ARM releases new chip for safety-critical IoT applications including surgical robots and automotive

As the IoT moves more into the consumer realm, chip manufacturers see the safety-critical processor as an important growth market

Chip designer ARM has released a microprocessor designed for real-time applications where safety is critical such as automotive, robotics and healthcare.

The new processor design, the Cortex R-52, has been in development for five years. It will meet safety standards such as IEC 61508 SIL 3 and ISO 26262 ASIL D, which should enable adoption by automotive manufacturers and makers of surgical robots.

The new chip is able to switch between tasks 14 times faster than its predecessor the Cortex R-5, said John Ronco, vice president of product marketing at ARM, who said the design has already been commercially licensed, including to electronics and semiconductor firm STMicroelectronics.

Among the more visible applications of the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) is the arrival of driverless cars and robots that assist surgeons with very delicate operations where human hands are too imprecise to operate effectively. These IoT applications, where machine-human interaction could cause risk of injury or death, are growing in number and importance.

Automobiles are becoming increasingly dependent on software to optimise performance and increasingly to make autonomous decisions too, but one of the key issues holding back developments such as driverless cars is concern over how easily they can be hacked and the consequences of software bugs.

"Cortex-R52 implements hardware to simplify the integration of increasingly complex real-time software environments while providing the robust separation of software necessary to protect safety-critical code," says ARM on its website.

"As the first ARMv8-R processor, Cortex-R52 introduces an extra privilege level which provides support for a hypervisor."

As the IoT moves more into the consumer realm, with machine-human interaction increasingly common, chip manufacturers see the safety-critical processor as an important growth market. In April, Intel acquired Yogitech, an IoT startup focused on functional security for semiconductors. Yogitech's focus up until this point has been on advanced driver assistance systems, and robotic and autonomous machines.

Formerly the UK's biggest technology firm, ARM was recently acquired by Japanese SoftBank Group for £23.3bn.