The mioty® Stack can be used as a flexible solution to meet your IoT use case needs. In part 1 of the article, we looked at the mioty® Stack features, the standards and the stack offering. In Part 2 of our post, we focus on the hardware that can be used to enable devices to communicate with mioty® and the product certification options that play a supporting role for product deployment.
Microcontrollers, radio chips and system-on-chip
The mioty® Stack has already been ported to a variety of hardware platforms consisting of either a microcontroller (MCU) in combination with a radio chip (TRX), or a System on Chip (SOC) silicon. The following table provides an overview of which hardware is currently being considered to enable a device to communicate via mioty® and on which hardware the mioty® Stack has already been successfully tested and used several times. Basically, the stack is developed for a specific reference hardware. However, the stack can be used on almost any hardware. Within our porting service we offer to port the stack to your desired hardware, which also includes the execution of all in-house tests to ensure stability and interoperability.
Hardware requirements
The stack includes a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that allows the stack to run on a specific hardware platform. The HAL attaches the following required hardware to the Protocol Stack itself:
• 1-2x timers
• 1x SPI (applies to dedicated transceiver)
• 2-4x GPIO (applies to and depends on dedicated transceivers)
• Software RF interface (applies to system-on-chip)
• AES encryption in hardware (if available and applicable)
• CRC calculation in hardware (if present and applicable)
Memory requirements:
The following code sizes indicate the memory requirements for typical mioty® applications on one of our named hardware with drivers and peripherals to use the stack as a "library" with the associated drivers, or alternatively the recommended amount of memory for a firmware when using the modem application. The values are to be understood only as reference points and are basically dependend on several factors, such as compiler, compiler configuration or hardware platform. In addition, the values explicitly do not consider any memory requirements of the application. RAM and flash can vary greatly due to maintenance or depending on the options or customizations selected.
Product certification - security for manufacturer and user
If you want to equip your devices with mioty® technology, you should also keep product certification in mind. The certification of products offers all market participants the security that defined standards and norms are adhered to and that interoperability is ensured. As the mioty® technology is still very young, a final certification process is currently being worked on by the mioty® Alliance. However, this is not an obstacle to decide to use the mioty® Stack right now. As a member of the technical committee of the mioty® Alliance, STACKFORCE is already involved in the development of the certification process, which will then be applied to STACKFORCE's mioty® Stack and pre-certify the stack for the reference hardware platforms. In addition, we ensure interoperability right now – during the build phase of the certification process – through intensive cross-testing. This means we test our end node stack with the base stations available on the market.
Another aspect is product certification, which is different from mioty® certification. Depending on the country of use of the device, different requirements have to be met. In order to support product certification according to the respective regional specifications, the mioty® Stack from STACKFORCE already offers integrated RF test functions (radio tests), which can be activated via a special test mode. This makes it possible to detect whether the product operates within the legal requirements in terms of radio technology, and a test center can award the test seal to the product.
Do you have questions about the mioty® Stack or would you like to use the technology for your products? Contact us, we will advise you comprehensively on the possibilities.