Internet of Things (IoT) Tutorial

 IoT (Internet of Things) is an advanced automation and analytics system

which exploits networking, sensing, big data, and artificial intelligence
technology to deliver complete systems for a product or service.

 These systems allow greater transparency, control, and performance when

applied to any industry or system.

 IoT systems have applications across industries through their unique

flexibility and ability to be suitable in any environment.

 They enhance data collection, automation, operations, and much more

through smart devices and powerful enabling technology.

System on a chip

The Raspberry Pi uses a system on a chip as an almost fully contained microcomputer. This SoC
does not contain any kind of data storage, which is common for a microprocessor SoC.

A system on a chip or system on chip (SoC) is an integrated circuit (also known

as a "chip") that integrates all components of a computer or other electronic
system.
These components typically include a central processing unit (CPU), memory,
input/output ports and secondary storage – all on a single substrate. It may contain
digital, analog, mixed-signal, and often radio frequency signal processing
functions, depending on the application.

As they are integrated on a single electronic substrate, SoCs consume much less
power and take up much less area than multi-chip designs with equivalent
functionality. Because of this, SoCs are very common in the mobile computing and
edge computing markets.[1][2]

Systems on chip are commonly used in embedded systems and the Internet of
Things.

Systems on Chip are in contrast to the common traditional motherboard-based PC

architecture, which separates components based on function and connects them
through a central interfacing circuit board.

Whereas a motherboard houses and connects detachable or replaceable

components, SoCs integrate all of these components into a single integrated circuit,
as if all these functions were built into the motherboard.

An SoC will typically integrate a CPU, graphics and memory interfaces,[nb 3] hard-
disk and USB connectivity,[nb 4] random-access and read-only memories and
secondary storage on a single circuit die, whereas a motherboard would connect
these modules as discrete components or expansion cards.

More tightly integrated computer system designs improve performance and reduce
power consumption as well as semiconductor die area needed for an equivalent
design composed of discrete modules, at the cost of reduced replaceability of
components.

By definition, SoC designs are fully or nearly fully integrated across different
component modules. For these reasons, there has been a general trend towards
tighter integration of components in the computer hardware industry, in part due to
the influence of SoCs and lessons learned from the mobile and embedded
computing markets. Systems-on-Chip can be viewed as part of a larger trend
towards embedded computing and hardware acceleration.

An SoC integrates a microcontroller or microprocessor with advanced peripherals

like graphics processing unit (GPU), Wi-Fi module, or one or more coprocessors.
Similar to how a microcontroller integrates a microprocessor with peripheral
circuits and memory, an SoC can be seen as integrating a microcontroller with
even more advanced peripherals. For an overview of integrating system
components, see system integration.

System on a Chip (SoC)

Definition - What does System on a Chip (SoC) mean?

 A system on a chip (SoC) combines the required electronic circuits of

various computer components onto a single, integrated chip (IC).

 SoC is a complete electronic substrate system that may contain analog,

digital, mixed-signal or radio frequency functions.

 Its components usually include a graphical processing unit (GPU), a central

processing unit (CPU) that may be multi-core, and system memory (RAM).

 Because SOC includes both the hardware and software, it uses less power,
has better performance, requires less space and is more reliable than multi-
chip systems.

Most system-on-chips today come inside mobile devices like smartphones

and tablets.

 System-on-a-chip (SoC) is a microchip with all the necessary electronic

circuits and parts for a given system, such as a smartphone or wearable
computer, on a single integrated circuit (IC).

 An SoC is specially designed to meet the standards of incorporating the

required electronic circuits of numerous computer components onto a single
integrated chip.
  Instead of a system that assembles several chips and components onto a
circuit board, the SoC fabricates all necessary circuits into one unit.

 The challenges of an SoC include higher prototyping and architecture costs,

more complex debugging and lower IC yields.

 IC is not cost effective and takes time to manufacture. However, this is

likely to change as the technology continues to be developed and employed.

 An SoC usually contains various components such as: Operating system,

Utility software applications, Voltage regulators and power management
circuits, Timing sources such as phase lock loop control systems or
oscillators, A microprocessor, microcontroller or digital signal processor,
Peripherals such as real-time clocks, counter timers and power-on-reset
generators

 External interfaces such as USB, FireWire, Ethernet, universal asynchronous

receiver-transmitter or serial peripheral interface bus

 Analog interfaces such as digital-to-analog converters and analog-to-digital

converters RAM and ROM memory

 ips today come inside mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

Structure

An SoC consists of hardware functional units, including microprocessors that run

software code, as well as a communications subsystem to connect, control, direct
and interface between these functional modules.
Functional components
Processor cores

An SoC must have at least one processor core, but will typically have more.

Processor cores can be a microcontroller, microprocessor (μP),[9] digital signal

processor (DSP) or application-specific instruction set processor (ASIP) core.[10]

ASIPs have instruction sets that are customized for an application domain and
designed to be more efficient than general-purpose instructions for a specific type
of workload.

Multiprocessor SoCs have more than one processor core by definition.

Whether single-core, multi-core or manycore, SoC processor cores typically use

RISC (A reduced instruction set computer, or RISC (/rɪsk/), is one whose instruction set
architecture (ISA) allows it to have fewer cycles per instruction (CPI) than a complex instruction
set computer (CISC).[)instruction set architectures.

RISC architectures are advantageous over CISC processors for systems-on-chip

because they require less digital logic, and therefore less power and area on board,
and in the embedded and mobile computing markets these are often highly
constrained.

In particular, SoC processor cores often use the ARM architecture (RM, previously
Advanced RISC Machine, originally Acorn RISC Machine, is a family of reduced instruction
set computing (RISC) architectures for computer processors, configured for various
environments.) because it is a soft processor

(is a microprocessor core that can be wholly implemented using logic synthesis)specified as
an IP core and more power efficient than x86.[9]

Memories
Further information: Computer memory

Systems-on-chip must have semiconductor memory blocks to perform their

computation, as do microcontrollers and other embedded systems.

Depending on the application, SoC memory may form a memory hierarchy and
cache hierarchy. In the mobile computing market, this is common, but in many
low-power embedded microcontrollers this is not necessary.
Memory technologies for SoCs include read-only memory (ROM), random-access
memory (RAM), electrically erasable programmable ROM (EEPROM) and flash
memory.[9]

As in other computer systems, RAM can be subdivided into relatively faster but
more expensive static RAM (SRAM) and the slower but cheaper dynamic RAM
(DRAM).

When a SoC has a cache hierarchy, SRAM will usually be used to implement
processor registers and cores' L1 caches whereas DRAM will be used for lower
levels of the cache hierarchy including main memory.

"Main memory" may be specific to a single processor (which can be multi-core)

when the SoC has multiple processors, in which case it is distributed memory and
must be sent via § Intermodule communication on-chip to be accessed by a
different processor.[10] For further discussion of multi-processing memory issues,
see cache coherence and memory latency.

Interfaces

SoCs include external interfaces, typically for communication protocols. These are
often based upon industry standards such as USB, FireWire, Ethernet, USART,
SPI, HDMI, I²C, etc. These interfaces will differ according to the intended
application. Wireless networking protocols such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 6LoWPAN
and near-field communication may also be supported.

When needed, SoCs include analog interfaces including analog-to-digital and

digital-to-analog converters, often for signal processing. These may be able to
interface with different types of sensors (a sensor is a device, module, or subsystem
whose purpose is to detect events or changes in its environment and send the information to other
electronics, frequently a computer processor.)

or actuators, including smart transducers. They may interface with application-

specific modules or shields.[nb 5] Or they may be internal to the SoC, such as if an
analog sensor is built in to the SoC and its readings must be converted to digital
signals for mathematical processing.

Digital signal processors

Digital signal processor (DSP) cores are often included on systems-on-chip. They
perform signal processing operations in systems-on-chip for sensors, actuators,
data collection, data analysis and multimedia processing. DSP cores typically
feature very long instruction word (VLIW) and single instruction, multiple data
(SIMD) instruction set architectures, and are therefore highly amenable to
exploiting instruction-level parallelism through parallel processing and superscalar
execution.[10]:4 DSP cores most often feature application-specific instructions, and
as such are typically application-specific instruction-set processors (ASIP). Such
application-specific instructions correspond to dedicated hardware functional units
that compute those instructions.

Typical DSP instructions include multiply-accumulate, Fast Fourier transform,

fused multiply-add, and convolutions.

Other

As with other computer systems, SoCs require timing sources to generate clock
signals, control execution of SoC functions and provide time context to signal
processing applications of the SoC, if needed. Popular time sources are crystal
oscillators and phase-locked loops.

System-on-chip peripherals including counter-timers, real-time timers and power-

on reset generators. SoCs also include voltage regulators and power management
circuits.

Intermodule communication

Systems-on-chip comprise many execution units. These units must often send data
and instructions back and forth. Because of this, all but the most trivial SoCs
require communications subsystems. Originally, as with other microcomputer
technologies, data bus architectures were used, but recently designs based on
sparse intercommunication networks known as networks-on-chip (NoC) have risen
to prominence and are forecast to overtake bus architectures for SoC design in the
near future.[11]

Bus-based communication

Historically, a shared global computer bus typically connected the different

components, also called "blocks" of the System-on-Chip.[11] A very common bus
for system-on-chip communications is ARM's royalty-free Advanced
Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA) standard.
Direct memory access controllers route data directly between external interfaces
and SoC memory, bypassing the CPU or control unit, thereby increasing the data
throughput of the system-on-chip. This is similar to some device drivers of
peripherals on component-based multi-chip module PC architectures.

Computer buses are limited in scalability, supporting only up to tens of cores

(multicore) on a single chip.[11]:xiii Wire delay is not scalable due to continued
miniaturization, system performance does not scale with the number of cores
attached, the SoC's operating frequency must decrease with each additional core
attached for power to be sustainable, and long wires consume large amounts of
electrical power. These challenges are prohibitive to supporting manycore systems
on chip.[11]:xiii

Network-on-Chip
Main article: Network on a chip

In the late 2010s, a trend of systems-on-chip implementing communications

subsystems in terms of a network-like topology instead of bus-based protocols has
emerged. A trend towards more processor cores on SoCs has caused on-chip
communication efficiency to become one of the key factors in determining the
overall system performance and cost.[11]:xiii This has led to the emergence of
interconnection networks with router-based packet switching known as "networks
on chip" (NoCs) to overcome the bottlenecks of bus-based networks.[11]:xiii

Networks-on-chip have advantages including destination- and application-specific

routing, greater power efficiency and reduced possibility of bus contention.
Network-on-chip architectures take inspiration from networking protocols like
TCP and the Internet protocol suite for on-chip communication,[11] although they
typically have fewer network layers. Optimal network-on-chip network
architectures are an ongoing area of much research interest. NoC architectures
range from traditional distributed computing network topologies such as torus,
hypercube, meshes and tree networks to genetic algorithm scheduling to
randomized algorithms such as random walks with branching and randomized time
to live (TTL).

Many SoC researchers consider NoC architectures to be the future of system-on-

chip design because they have been shown to efficiently meet power and
throughput needs of SoC designs. Current NoC architectures are two-dimensional.
2D IC design has limited floorplanning choices as the number of cores in SoCs
increase, so as three-dimensional integrated circuits (3DICs) emerge, SoC
designers look to build three-dimensional on-chip networks known as 3DNoCs.[11]

IoT Hardware
IoT Hardware includes a wide range of devices such as devices for routing, bridges,
sensors etc.

These IoT devices manage key tasks and functions such as system activation, security,
action specifications, communication, and detection of support-specific goals and
actions.

Let’s discuss Working & Components of IoT in detail

IoT Hardware components can vary from low-power boards; single-board processors
like the Arduino Uno which are basically smaller boards that are plugged into
mainboards to improve and increase its functionality by bringing out specific
functions or features (such as GPS, light and heat sensors, or interactive displays).

A programmer specifies a board’s input and output, then creates a circuit design to
illustrate the interaction of these inputs and outputs.

Another well-known IoT platform is Raspberry Pi 2, which is a very affordable and

tiny computer that can incorporate an entire web server. Often called “RasPi,” it has
enough processing power and memory to run Windows 10 on it as well as IoT Core.
RasPi exhibits great processing capabilities, especially when using the Python
programming language.
IoT Hardware – Arduino Uno

Another well-known IoT platform is Raspberry Pi 2, which is a very affordable and

tiny computer that can incorporate an entire web server. Often called “RasPi,” it has
enough processing power and memory to run Windows 10 on it as well as IoT Core.
RasPi exhibits great processing capabilities, especially when using the Python
programming language.
IoT Hardware – Raspberry Pi 2

BeagleBoard is a single-board computer with a Linux-based OS that uses an ARM

processor, capable of more powerful processing than RasPi. Tech giant
Intel’s Galileo and Edison boards are other options, both great for larger scale
production, and Qualcomm has manufactured an array of enterprise-level IoT
technology for cars and cameras to healthcare.
Router
A router is a network layer hardware device that transmits data from one LAN to another if
both networks support the same set of protocols. So a router is typically connected to at least
two LANs and the internet service provider (ISP). It receives its data in the form of packets,
which are data frames with their destination address added. Router also strengthens the signals
before transmitting them. That is why it is also called repeater.

Routing Table
A router reads its routing table to decide the best available route the packet can take to reach its
destination quickly and accurately. The routing table may be of these two types −

 Static − In a static routing table the routes are fed manually. So it is suitable only for very
small networks that have maximum two to three routers.
  Dynamic − In a dynamic routing table, the router communicates with other routers
through protocols to determine which routes are free. This is suited for larger networks
where manual feeding may not be feasible due to large number of routers.

Switch
Switch is a network device that connects other devices to Ethernet networks through twisted
pair cables. It uses packet switching technique to receive, store and forward data packets on
the network. The switch maintains a list of network addresses of all the devices connected to it.

On receiving a packet, it checks the destination address and transmits the packet to the correct
port. Before forwarding, the packets are checked for collision and other network errors. The data
is transmitted in full duplex mode

Data transmission speed in switches can be double that of other network devices like hubs used
for networking. This is because switch shares its maximum speed with all the devices connected
to it. This helps in maintaining network speed even during high traffic. In fact, higher data
speeds are achieved on networks through use of multiple switches.