This is a guest blog by David Blaza, Marketing Strategy Consultant at ARM.

Recently I’ve been consulting for ARM (that little British processor IP company you may have heard of) and have taken a deep dive into the world of embedded computing boards (you can check it out here) and am going to share some insights into what I found and distill it all into 5 trends to watch. But first let me say that I have been a fan of Octopart from the very beginning because as good as most distributor sites are they don’t give you a complete picture of what’s out there in the market and that’s the beauty and simplicity of Octopart. Octopart also has a very intuitive category search engine that we used to find ARM based boards. Here is how I used Octopart to find ARM based boards:

I entered ARM into the search and then the categories appear on the left hand side, select Semiconductors > Microprocessors > scroll down to filters > select Core sub-architecture> tick the ARM boxes and this is what you get:

380 ARM based boards, tools and software ready to be ordered from your favorite distributor. You can add and remove filters at will and it’s so easy to use they should get an award!

So what have I found on my exploration of the ARM board world and what are the 5 trends? I will start that this world is growing quickly. Only a few years ago there were just a handful of ARM based dev kits and production ready boards (Like COM/SOM, picoITX etc.) to be found, but today there are new development kits coming out monthly and over 120 board vendors serving a growing professional market. The poster board (pun intended) for this movement is clearly the Raspberry Pi (which you can find right here on Octopart), which has sold over 4 million units, but the new Pi 2 with a quad core ARM Cortex-A7 processor and 1GB of RAM for the same $35 is also going to sell like hot pies. So here’s the first major trend in play: incredible processing power at low cost.

You may remember that Raspberry Pi was originally funded through Kickstarter and this is my second trend to watch (I got my Pebble watch through Kickstarter!) because new technology using ARM processors is coming from unlikely places when crowdfunding levels the playing field. Just 2 weeks ago a team in Italy launched a Kickstarter campaign for the UDOO Neo board (see picture below) which is basically a Raspberry Pi and Arduino board combined, and again you can get one for $35 if you get in on the deal now.

The third trend driving ARM success in the board market is the Open Source movement; why pay for Windows when you can get Ubuntu for free? Or Android? Or any number of free real time operating systems like FreeRTOS?

The fourth trend is ubiquitous connectivity, there is Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wherever we go and even the less than cooperative mobile carriers are starting to open up their network to low speed data and now you can get a cellular modem and SIM card like the Spark Electron (see pic below) for $39 and $2.99/month for data. Incidentally this was also on Kickstarter and it blew through its goal).

So my fifth and perhaps most profound trend is that the culmination of the four trends above will make the fifth a reality and that the Internet of Things (IoT). Some of you may be starting to get to the eye rolling stage when you hear IoT, but in reality we are just at the very beginning and the beauty is there is no single dominant player yet so it’s going to be lots of fun seeing it play out. Heck, you might even get a job out of it. Please consider clicking over to my ARM board content on the ARM Connected Community and feel free to get in touch or have your say right here on Octopart.