Microcontroller-Agnostic Industrial IoT

Like nearly all industry events over the past 9 to 10 months, this year's Embedded Tech Trends was held virtually. It was good to see the faces—via Zoom—of all my old friends in the embedded boards industry and in the technology media. Among the hot-button topics discussed that were of interest to me is the work by PICMG (PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group) toward enabling standards in industrial IoT. I've talked before in this column about why there's no need to wait for standards when it comes to building out IoT implementations. All the building blocks for IoT have been with us for several years now. And while of course you have to choose your wireless protocols, every IoT situation is so different that "architecture" standards aren't really necessary. All that said, what PICMG has been working on for over four years is aimed at industrial IoT (IIoT), where there are certain requirements that make interoperability and formfactor standards desirable. There's a compelling argument for linking an IIoT network architecture and an edge device form factor to PICMG's embedded computing standards like COM Express and others. In the microcontroller-centric mindset that I have as editor of Circuit Cellar, one piece of PICMG's series of IIoT-related open standards caught my attention in particular. The Micro Sensor Adapter Module (MicroSAM) is the first of these PICMG standards to reach ratification (in October 2020). At the ETT event, Doug Sandy, PICMG's Chief Technical Officer provided a great presentation about MicroSAM and why it's significant. MicroSAM is an open specification that defines a 32mm × 32mm module hardware platform for traditional sensor vendors wishing to quickly create smart sensors. MicroSAM enables a fundamentally different IIoT architecture, offering a distributed architecture with true Plug and Play network integration. According to PICMG, MicroSAM fills a need that's never been addressed by other industry specifications: a com