Benchmarks Coming to IoT

Article By : Rick Merritt

EEMBC is detailing Bluetooth and security benchmarks

SAN JOSE, Calif. — New benchmarks for the power consumption of two key IoT functions — Bluetooth and security — are rolling out from the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium. EEMBC is making details of SecureMark available to members now, and the Bluetooth benchmark is about a month away.

SecureMark gauges the power consumption of a TLS 1.2 handshake, seen by members including Arm, Synopsys, and Analog Devices to be a representative security function. It measures joules consumed and microseconds taken to perform its 11 functions, which use elliptic curve cryptography and AES-128.

Scores are calculated into a single SecureMark number typically ranging from 1,000 to 100,000, with higher numbers representing a better score. The benchmark should help engineers to both tune their software stacks and select hardware accelerators that deliver optimal performance.

Documentation of the test is available to EEMBC members now. Chip companies involved in the effort are expected to report results on the group’s website within six months.

Separately, EEMBC is about a month away from releasing details of a Bluetooth benchmark. It will score energy consumed on an IoT end node, gathering and processing sensor data and reporting it to a gateway via BLE.

Silicon Labs leads the Bluetooth effort with support from Dialog, STMicroelectronics, and others. Both SecureMark and the Bluetooth test are based on EEMBC’s IoT Connect, a hardware and software test framework that the group has used for three IoT-related benchmarks.

— Rick Merritt, Silicon Valley Bureau Chief, EE Times