Plug-in, Turn-on: Wearable Development will Gain an Edge in 2015

Targeting a mainstream market beyond fitness buffs and quantified-self hipsters, wearables will begin establishing themselves in 2015 as the most important piece of personal electronics since the smartphone - even relegating that centerpiece of individual tech to a secondary role. While not the first such device, the Apple Watch due to ship in 2015 provides a validating market presence that promises to significantly expand market awareness and competitive offerings. For engineers charged with implementing new wearable products, 2015 will also bring growing pressure to quickly solve the complexity of wearable design and deliver products able to achieve greater functional capability at significantly lower power. Intended to serve this critical design need, wearable design platforms will emerge as a key enabler of wearable product rapid development.

Wearable designs represent a unique challenge for systems designers with functional requirements as diverse as advanced real-time sensor-fusion processing, sophisticated application execution, and novel human-machine interface features. At the same time, engineers must deliver these capabilities within a tiny footprint able to slip into fashion-driven packaging - all the while worn comfortably from day to day with minimal need for removal for battery charging, software updates, or other needs typical of an electronic product. Finally, engineers must implement these sophisticated designs in record time to beat an increasingly frenzied rush to gain a competitive foothold in a rapidly evolving market.

Figure 1: No longer the sole domain of quantified-self hipsters, wearables will rush into the mainstream, requiring ready-made development platforms able to speed time-to-market of new wearable products. (Source: iStockPhoto.com)

In this environment, wearable design platforms will emerge widely to speed time-to-market with pre-packaged solutions to the most difficult aspects of wearable design. For instance, ultra-low-power design requires a combination of low-power ICs, hardware design techniques, and software methods to achieve the lowest possible power consumption short of compromising application functionality. Rather than spending time tuning designs for critical features such as low-power operation, wireless charging, and others, engineers can take advantage of the design platform's built-in solution, optimized for wearable applications.

Wearable design platforms package hardware and software in development kits intended to showcase systems solutions backed by hardware manufacturers and their partners. The centerpiece of these platforms is a tiny hardware module designed to serve as a drop-in solution for all but the most specialized design requirements. While more such platforms will continue to appear in 2015, two platforms likely to cause a stir in 2015 include the WaRPboard and Intel Edison.

Expected to ship in early 2015, the WaRPboard reference platform represents the efforts of hardware, software, and manufacturing companies to offer an open-source reference platform for wearable designers. Based on Freescale processors, WaRPboard hardware includes a main board fitted with a Freescale i.MX 6SoloLite ARM Cortex-A9 core-based application processor and a daughter card using a Freescale Kinetis KL16 ARM Cortex-M0+ core-based MCU for real-time processing. In this hybrid architecture, designers implement their wearable application on the main board, using the daughter card for real-time tasks including sensor processing and wireless charging. WaRPboard addresses connectivity diversity required in wearables with built-in support for both WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0.

The Intel Edison features a similar hybrid processor architecture based on an Intel SoC that includes a dual-core 500 MHz Atom CPU for application processing and a 32-bit 100MHz Quark MCU for real-time execution. The postage-stamp-size board includes 1GB LPDDR3, 4 GB EMMC, and 40 GPIOs configurable as a wide range of I/O peripherals including USB 2.0, UART, and I2C, among others. Also supporting both dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0, the Intel Edison module includes a device-to-device and device-to-cloud connectivity framework to enable cross-device communication and a cloud-based analytics service.

WaRPboard and Intel are by no means the only players in the wearable-reference design-platform game. For example, Texas Instruments has offered its eZ430-Chronos kit for years. Based on a 16-bit MCU with integrated sub-GHz RF, the eZ430-Chronos provides a complete development platform including watch, hardware, and software. With its integrated-wireless capabilities, the Chronos serves as a central hub for nearby wireless sensors, such as pedometers and heart-rate monitors.

Design platforms such as the TI eZ430-Chronos are unique in including a wrist- or arm-worn accessory, but wearables can of course be housed in diverse packages and worn anywhere - not only in plain sight on the wrist, but incorporated into articles of clothing, simply pinned to garments, or even stuck to the skin. Indeed, engineers will find a growing number of wearable-reference platforms or simple-reference designs revolving around ICs and IC chip-sets. For example, targeting for wearable medical applications, Maxim Integrated bills its Wellness Platform as a suite of design hardware and software based on its WASP/MAX32600 MCU. In fact, engineers who would rather create their own design solutions will find a growing number of ultra-low-power MCUs designed specifically to meet wearable-design requirements.

With enough time and expertise, an experienced design team can build exceptional wearable applications based on these MCUs. Yet, time-to-market is a critical factor in the wearables market. For wearable-design companies and design engineers, a key decision in 2015 will lie in balancing the possibility of product differentiation and performance in building a wearable design based on these MCUs against the probability of quick market entry using a wearable reference platform.