The internet of things (IoT) market is expanding at a rate where distinguishing it as a separate category is beginning to seem a bit absurd. Increasingly, new products — and updates of existing ones — are smart and/or connected. One company is changing the fundamental calculus behind this shift by lowering the barrier considerably when it comes to what it costs to make something ‘smart,’ both in terms of the upfront bill of materials, along with subsequent support and development costs.
MicroEJ CEO Fred Rivard took me through his company’s history from its founding in 2004 until now. Much of those earlier years were spent in development, but since around 2012 or so, the French company has been deploying for IoT devices what Android is to smartphones — a flexible, extensible platform that can operate on a wide range of hardware profiles while being relatively easy to target for application and feature developers. MicroEJ takes the ‘code once, deploy anywhere’ maxim to the extreme, since its platform is designed from the ground up to be incredibly conservative when it comes to resource consumption, meaning it can run on hardware with as little as one-tenth or more the bill of materials cost of running more complex operating platforms — like Android Things, for instance.
“We take category of device where currently, Android is too big,” Rivard said. “So it doesn’t fit, even though you would like to have the capability to add software easily devices, but you can’t because Android is too big. The cost of entry is roughly $10 to $15 per unit in hardware and bill of material — that’s the cost of Android […] So it would be great to be able to run an Android layer, but you can’t just because of the cost. So we managed to reduce that cost, and to basically design a very small layer that’s1000 times smarter than Android.”
MicroEJ has always had cost advantages in terms of silicon requirements vs. competing platforms like Android Things, but now that Google has officially announced that it’s going to be driving its own IoT platform towards smart speakers and displays, there’s even more opportunity to power the myriad other IoT devices that exist (with new ones entering the fray all the time ranging from dimmer switches to grills to toilet seats).
Just before CES, satellite maker Iridium revealed that it was working with MicroEJ on its new Iridium Edge Pro IoT satellite communication device, a perfect example of how the company’s existing platform could become instrumental in powering the next generation of New Space companies — particularly with regard to to satellite communications and ground-based relay and use of said communications here on Earth.
Because of the way that MicroEJ is architected, third-party developers don’t require special expertise to build applications for IoT devices. That means developers with Java and C++ skills can create software to do things like track assets across vast ocean fleets; monitor infrastructure for potential breakdown risk; keep an eye on distributed mining equipment across a huge site; and much more without requiring any special knowledge — which represents both cost and time savings for anyone looking to leverage satellite IoT connectivity from space.
“If you look at the embedded industry, electronic devices, what is well-known is that when you once you have decided what hardware parts you want to put on your device and your PCB, it will roughly take you four to five months to create your device,” Rivard said. “The idea is to try to put software design on that timeline. That way you have the hardware team working in parallel with software ready to transition. So we create, in one week, a virtual device that has all the display characteristics, the buttons, etc., so that the software team can, in fact, really develop on the PC.”
That ability not only helps cut down development time, it also helps ensure that hardware is right-sized for its specific use before companies enter large-scale production. In an industry like space, that’s crucial because engineers optimize for cost and mass when building technology designed for orbital environments.
“Let’s imagine you are the marketing guy and you have an idea that the device you’re building should have some kind of protocol or service,” Rivard explained. “And then the implementation team, could come back and say, ‘okay, that cost you 15kb of flash’ which translates to maybe 10 cents. Then you can you can adjust the price again ahead of launching the hardware design. Most of our customer, in fact, do roughly 10 to 20% bill of material reduction just by simulating the software ahead of time.”
In addition to Iridium, MicroEJ has also worked with the European Space Agency (ESA) and others in the sector. Their ground-based customers tend to have higher volume (you generally produce a heck of a lot more smart appliances than you do satellites, after all) but the small satellite sector is growing, and along consumer broadband, IoT connectivity will likely make up a significant portion of that satellite capability.
Back on terra firma, just about everything that could potentially gain smart features is getting them — as are many things that really don’t seem to need them. Edge computing is taking off in a big way, leading to chipmakers designing silicon specifically to do more advanced processing without relying on a broadband connection.
But there’s a much bigger opportunity for devices, both in the consumer market and in industry, that have just enough smarts to do something simple repeatedly, and that’s where MicroEJ stands to be one of the biggest winners of the Internet of Things’ inevitable transformation into the Internet of Everything.