Advantages of Heterogeneous SoCs in IoT Applications

Fog/cloud computing is mostly based on an x86 architecture and place high demands on security, connectivity, computing power and AI support. Edge computing or sensor/actuator nodes, on the other hand, require more deeply embedded features such as the direct connection of sensors and actuators as well as real-time capabilites. For this purpose, a microcontroller is used and connected via a serial connection with a powerful host processor. Heterogeneous SoC combine both on a single chip, enabling completely new solutions with higher performance and flexibility but reduced space and cost. We show the power of interprocessor communication between an Cortex-M4 and A7, and how the different distribution of peripherals affects data throughput and system utilization. Using the example of Linux and FreeRTOS, we also examine the software features of interprocessor communication. With an M-Bus stack implementation on the STM32MP1 we show a concrete implementation example of the above methods.