SECO joins ARM's Project Cassini initiative for a new era of Arm-based Edge

SECO, a leading technological innovator and provider of Internet of Things solutions, proudly announces that it has joined Project Cassini, an initiative led by Arm, achieving its first Arm® SystemReady IR Certification for SECO’s SBC-C61 single board computer based on the NXP i.MX 8M Mini microprocessor.

SECO has deep, proven expertise in developing embedded devices, edge computing platforms and IoT solutions, and regularly offers this expertise to cross-industry and cross-community embedded interoperability, security, and standardization projects. Providing software expertise and leveraging its long-term partnership with Arm, SECO proudly joins the community of Arm partners involved in Project Cassini.

Project Cassini is an open, standards-based and security-oriented initiative created by Arm, aimed at ensuring a cloud native software experience across a secure Arm edge ecosystem. With Project Cassini, Arm and its partners have created an ecosystem of standards for development of edge platforms, enabling easy deployment of cloud-based software and applications in the field.

A key foundation of Project Cassini, the Arm SystemReady compliance certification program verifies that Arm-based edge devices meet specific hardware and firmware requirements, thus enabling commercial and community operating systems to run without issue. 

SECO has now achieved SystemReady IR certification for its SBC-C61 platform, a Single Board Computer (SBC) featuring NXP i.MX 8M Mini microprocessors. SystemReady IR certification, for IoT edge devices that are built around systems on chip (SoCs) based on the Arm A-profile architecture, ensures interoperability with embedded Linux and other embedded operating systems. Achieving the SystemReady IR certification means that SECO’s SBC-C61 implements a set of hardware and firmware features that a non-proprietary operating system (OS) can depend on to deploy the OS image.

In addition to being SystemReady, SECO is also pursuing PSA Certified status for the SBC-C61. PSA Certified is an industry leading security certification and another key pillar of Project Cassini. PSA Certified devices meet key security goals aligned with standards and use case requirements, which will enable SECO to further embrace security best practice. SECO is also participating in the development of Oniro, a project aimed at redefining how an open-source operating system can run across a variety of IoT devices, bridging the gap of technology fragmentation and lack in usability, performance and security. This operating system, which complies with a series of standardization and interoperability requirements adopted by the Cassini ecosystem.

“As the number of edge endpoints grows - along with the number of data streams – diversity among devices can be an obstacle to their interoperability, especially at the application level,” said Mohamed Awad, vice president, IoT and Embedded at Arm. “By joining an initiative that’s underpinned by Arm SystemReady, SECO can leverage a broad software ecosystem, helping them to stay ahead of the technology demands of our connected world.

“For SECO and our customers, the benefit of participating in Project Cassini is twofold. First, it enables seamless and therefore fast integration of our SystemReady certified devices into larger systems and networks, which can be used by a broad ecosystem of partners in many different markets. Second, being also a software solutions provider, SECO can become an active part of this ecosystem by opening our software offering to third parties,” says Marco Sogli, Head of SW R&D & DevOps at SECO. “By joining Project Cassini, we once again demonstrate that at SECO, standardization, security and openness are essential principles.”