Developing smart, networked products for the IoT is a real challenge. Addressing the interplay between wireless and embedded systems and topics like security, cloud integration, and energy management is time-consuming and requires substantial expertise. But there is a solution! We talk about the Make-IoT-easy-Guide with our Guest Gary Sugita.

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Guest: Gary Sugita, Director of Marketing, IoT Compute and Wireless Business Unit at Infineon Technologies
Moderator: Thomas Reinhardt, Director Corporate Campaigns ＆ Customer Communication, Infineon
Date of publication: 03 May 2023

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Moderator:

Hi everyone. Welcome to a new episode of the #MakeIoTwork podcast. My name is Thomas Reinhardt, I am your host, and I am excited to have this great opportunity sharing this podcast with all of you. 

My guest today is an absolute IoT expert with extensive experience in creating solutions for the Internet of Things. And he is on a mission: He wants to make the IoT easy - for IoT developers and all who want to bring innovative IoT devices to market. Because sometimes, that can be quite a challenge. Today, I'm talking with Gary Sugita, Director of Solutions in the IoT Compute and Wireless Business Unit at Infineon Technologies. Welcome, Gary.

Guest:

It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Moderator:

Gary, what do you think are the trends we can look forward to in the evolution of the IoT over the next few years?

Guest:

Yes, Thomas, I think the Internet of Things can have a profound effect over our lives. Some of the things I think are trends over the years:

Number one: modern cities of today need smart solutions to enable seamless mobility. We all want to be portable. We all want to be able to keep in touch with others as we move around. So having that seamless mobility in the infrastructure for that is important.

We're also seeing a growing aging society that require solutions that make our lives more convenient for the elderly in that growing population. Extending the time they can live independently at home before having to go to an elderly care facility for example, is an area that we try to address with IoT.

And then the third is, you know we have a fast-changing environment with limited resources. And so there's a need for us to look at ways that we can be very energy efficient - in the products we make, in the way that we manage our energy through smart cities and smart buildings.
So with those trends, IoT has a key role in trying to help address those growing mega trends. We need IoT devices that can talk to each other in an intelligent network, and for this to happen we need devices themselves to be secure, stable and connected and intelligent as well.

Moderator:

So you named a couple of very interesting trends and applications and of course, now many want to participate in these emerging markets and want to take their stake, so to say, in this attractive business. But developing smart and connected products for the IoT is really a challenge - addressing the right interplay between wireless connectivity and embedded systems, integrating topics like security, cloud integration, energy management and also the inclusion of algorithms is time-consuming and requires substantial expertise. What is Infineon doing to make it easier to develop IoT products?

Guest:

Yeah, thanks Thomas. First of all, Infineon is a true IoT company with a very large portfolio of products. This enables us to serve as a one-stop-shop for our customers who are developing IoT applications. Some of the products that we have include sensors, microcontrollers, things for actuation, wireless connectivity and even security. And what I like about Infineon as well is not only do we provide the hardware but we also provide robust software development tools and services that go along with those products.

Even in addition, I would say we also have an extensive partner ecosystem as well that allow us to deliver complementary products and services that they have along with what we offer to our mutual customers. And what this means is that we just don't offer products, what we offer at the end of the day are systems and solutions to our customers, enabling them to actually reach their goals in a much shorter time and achieve faster time to market.

Moderator:

OK, I see. So when implementing IoT into a device, if you can say so, the manufacturer actually has to make different decisions: Which set of functions should I integrate? Which system will work best for me? Which level of security even do I need to integrate? And so with your experience, what is your advice?

Guest:

Yeah, you know, IoT is hard, right? It's a daunting task in many cases and as you mentioned, it often requires this convergence of multiple technical disciplines, whether that's in the embedded side with machine learning at the edge, human machine interfaces, wireless connectivity, cloud, security, privacy, etc. And we try to do at least in the system level solutions we provide is give customers a choice. And so within security there are different functions and use cases for security for IoT. Whether that's establishing a TLS connection or storing private credentials. So we offer the capability to do multiple things. And in the solutions and the system level things we deliver, we try to articulate and demonstrate that these are different ways you can use the products within these different types of use cases. So the answer to that is: we try to make it a little modular so that people could actually take those what they need and apply that to their own application.

Moderator:

That sounds good this module approach. Maybe you have a rather concrete example in mind of how this could work, which products and solutions are used and maybe how we can help customers in one concrete use case.

Guest:

Yeah, Thomas, as one example of this let’s take an application of a smart door lock. We can enable multiple subsystem solutions for that smart door lock. First of all, the heart of an IoT application is the processor and so we have a PSoC™ 6 very ultra low power microcontroller that is in many smart locks today, for example, that is coupled with our AIROC™ Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity to be able to make it a smart connected lock as an example. And so part of that solution is showing how the interplay is between the compute and connectivity portion in the smart lock.

But we do more than that. We're also able to address some of the emerging standards for smart home. One of those standards is Matter, which is from the Connectivity Standards Alliance which are trying to define a common protocol for smart things in your home to be able to communicate with each other. And so we've taken some of that pain and integrated that into some of our examples on how you can implement a smart door lock using that Matter protocol.

We have other things in our portfolio as well, such as we can pull in solutions around HMI so we can deliver capacitive touch keypads, proximity sensing with our CAPSENSE™ technology, we can deliver NFC as another means for access control for a lock. We can even do energy harvesting from your mobile phone, from your NFC wireless communication interface for a mobile phone to help power a lock in case of a power outage or your battery running out of your lock. And so we have a lot of things in our portfolio today that we can bring as far as solutions go into an application like a smart for example.

Moderator:

Thank you very much. I think that was a very, very good example of integrating several use cases in just one application. So now we've talked quite a bit about Infineon products and solutions. However, our strong network of partners is also an important element in supporting our customers, as you said it earlier. So Gary, can you elaborate here about a current project we are working on together with one partner?

Guest:

Yeah, that's a good question. We absolutely rely on partners to help provide some of our solutions that we deliver to our mutual customers. And you know our strategy is not to reinvent the wheel if it exists somewhere and so we want to leverage that partner ecosystem that we have. So an example of this is around machine learning for example. We have different partners that offer different ways to help help a developer to develop their inference model for their machine learning algorithms. In particular, we're working with one today called Micro AI. And Micro AI is a company that actually has an agent that runs on the MCU that we have, and you can actually create your inference model by training it live on the actual MCU in your system. And so their claim to fame is to be able to allow an embedded developer to actually develop their inference model without having to have a data scientist on staff to do that. So we have a project that we've just recently done where we do machine learning to do anomaly detection for a motor, for predictive maintenance activities where you want to predict early signs of where things are not working quite correctly to be able to actually take action before it becomes a catastrophic type of failure.

Moderator:

Cool. It's really a nice example for collaboration of two companies. It's just in the spirit of “Together we make the IoT work”. I like that.

Guest:

Yeah, I know. It's definitely a collaborative effort. In speaking of collaboration, it's not just expertise that comes from my team. Like we work across different Infineon divisions to leverage the vast expertise Infineon has as a global company. And so leveraging that expertise creates value for our customers to help them use our products in a very meaningful way that adds value and helps them solve the problems they're trying to address in their system.

Moderator:

I absolutely agree with you on those points.
Unfortunately, we're already coming to the end of our podcast episode. And I always ask our guests to take a look into the crystal ball. Now, I already asked you about IoT trends at the beginning, but what I would still be interested in: What else can we as Infineon do together with our partners to make our customers' lives even easier? Are there any new paths being taken here in collaboration with customers? New concepts or approaches, when and how to start a collaboration?

Guest:

I would say that what we try to do in general is to address customer problems and so the first step in all that is to really understand what challenges our customers have in developing their IoT application. We have an extensive team that works very closely hand in hand with customers, understanding what their issues are and how we can help them. And so it typically starts there and once we understand what the problems are, then we can help articulate ways that Infineon can actually address those issues. And there may be multiple approaches or ways that we attack some of those problems. But you know, we are trying to demonstrate ways at which we can reduce the hurdles that customers face to address those issues as well. So whether that's giving them a reference design or giving them a starting point to work on their design, we're trying to help them along their IoT journey by giving them as much expertise, confidence and examples as possible to be able to make it easy for them to implement their IoT application.

Moderator:

Thank you very much, Gary. It was a great closing and thank you very much also for the great insights. This brings us to the end of this episode. Dear listeners: If you want to learn more about us and our world of IoT, visit our website www.infineon.io. If you're currently listening to us on Spotify or Apple Podcast, we'd love for you to subscribe to our podcast and maybe even leave a little review. Now it only remains for me to wish you a good time. Take care and see you next time.