Fabrizio Rovati of STMicroelectronics has revealed details about the partnership with IOTA in a new episode of Untangled and has reported on future plans.
According to Rovati, the company is in talks with potential interested parties who could use X-CUBE-IOTA1 and IOTA technology.

In the new episode of the IOTA podcast “Untangled”, Fabrizio Rovati of STMicroelectronics spoke about the partnership with IOTA and the joint efforts in the field of Internet of Things (IoT). STMicroelectronics is a global company with almost 50,000 employees worldwide and Europe’s largest semiconductor company.

The cooperation between IOTA and STMicroelectronics focuses on the X-CUBE-IOTA1 extension software package for the STM32Cube. This represents a middleware solution to enable the functions of the IOTA Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).

In the podcast, Rovati explained that pretty much everyone in the world has probably already come into contact with a product from STMicroelectronics, although most of them are probably not aware of it. As Rovati explained, there are many technologies in the automotive industry in the area of security and connectivity, but also microcontrollers in the smart home area and sensors in the smart phone area.

Details about the partnership between IOTA and STMicroelectronics

As Rovati explained, STMicroelectronics has recently released a Software Development Kit (SDK) for the STM32 microcontroller, which allows to operate an IOTA node. The code for the X-CUBE-IOTA1 is open source and freely available. When asked why the large corporation decided to partner with IOTA and what STMicroelectronics hopes to gain from this partnership, Rovati explained:

We started to investigate Distributed Ledger technologies a couple of years ago. […] We told that IOTA was a particula good interception between DLT and IoT. […] Our focus is in the smart industries, smart cities, smart driving – we told that this could be a very good way to get into the distributed ledger and so we started interact with you an so we started to build this package.

This is our idea, we have hopes that this new type of technology can enable new use cases to enable any type of opportuinities over applications and our goal is to be there when these new apllication, new needs are coming to supply our components.

Asked about the current status of the partnership and what is happening behind the scenes, Rovati said that his company continues to work on the SDK and a new release with new features and new supported platforms will come in the near future. Also, there is a growing understanding of the use cases for which the SDK can be used. For example, one area is the smart energy sector. The company is also, according to Rovati, in talks with potential interested parties who could use X-CUBE-IOTA1 and the IOTA technology.

The partnership between IOTA and STMicroelectronics has great synergetic potential to jointly drive progress forward:

I think one of the most disruptive and innovative things that distributed ledger and IOTA brings is that to be able to leverage it in different ways, contracts and also data management. Personally, I am very interessted in micro transaction type of use cases […] I think these are the use cases that are very interesting for people in general. […] The other thing where I think it is very interesting is the possibilty to have more control on data or privacy on data and allow also transaction on data. […] I think with the technology of IOTA you can achieve this.

Regarding further cooperation possibilities and application scenarios, Rovati emphasized:

For exmaple in the utility services, particular smart energy […] Another thing that resonates with our focus is automotives, the battery charging, but also other cases like sharing econmy, the Just-In-Time economy. […] In general we see a lot of use cases but we don’t want to limit the creativity of our customers.

You can listen to the whole Untangled episode at the following link.

IOTA and STMicroelectronics expand partnership

Jake Simmons