STMicroelectronics will integrate IOTA Tangle to Facilitate new IoT Solutions 

the IOTA Foundation,  a non-profit organization which developed the ideas behind IOTA and the Tangle architecture, announced on July 23, a new collaboration with STMicroelectronics, a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications, in order to deliver Internet of Things (IoT) integration capabilities to the ST user community. 

IoT Simplified

The focus of this collaboration is the integration of Tangle technology, a fee-free, peer-to-peer (P2P) solution, into ST’s STM32Cube expansion software for the industry-leading STM32 32-bit MCU ecosystem, the X-CUBE-IOTA1.

Developers will be now able to leverage the scalable P2P network and feeless structure of IOTA to develop systems, environments, products, and services for the ST user community.

Alessandro Cremonesi, STMicroelectronics VP System Research, and Application, explains that developers can now use the STM32 Open Development Environment to create valuable applications which include IOTA features and capabilities.

The sectors such as energy and logistics will now benefit from advanced performance capabilities in critical areas, including sensing, power management, connectivity, and audio. Developers using STM32 will have the ability to transmit, buy and sell relevant data through embedded technologies like Bluetooth® LE at low cost, with an easy, robust solution.

A Brief Summary of IOTA

Since it was founded in 2015, IOTA has entered into a number of valuable partnerships with the likes of Volkswagen, Fujitsu, Telekom, Alyx, Primority, and Samsung.

Unlike other cryptocurrencies, IOTA’s underlying technology is not a blockchain but a directed acyclic graph (DAG). This kind of ledger is a “directed graph” data structure that uses the method of topological ordering to verify transactions. In other words, in order to be able to send a transaction, two other transactions have to be validated. In addition one of the most interesting thing regarding IOTA is that it can operate offline and synchronize later, a very important feature for IoT applications where there is no guarantee for 100% connectivity.

Nevertheless, IOTA is not fully decentralized as the need for a centralized coordinator is still there, even though this remains the number one priority for the IOTA Foundation’s Research & Development teams.

IOTA and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

To have a functional smart device mechanism, machine builders must open the closed proprietary systems but nowadays this process is not free, especially when it comes to software integration.

So, how could the machine builders possibly be convinced to open up their API’s and interfaces? Data is a possible incentive.

We always hear IoT enthusiasts speaking of self-communication between smart devices that would allow lowering downtime and higher effectiveness by being able to collect an enormous amount of data about the state, faults or performance of the machines. Nowadays data can be monetized, and industrial data is not particularly different from consumer data apart from one thing: industrial data needs a high level of privacy and security.

Here is where IOTA comes into play with Tangle, which assures secure high-speed and low-cost transactions with a certain level of privacy, data could be now bought or sold on an industrial data market place.

In this case, machine owners would increase their knowledge on how to operate their own machines (today that information are mostly exclusive to manufacturers) and sell this information to costumers.