By Stephen Nellis

SAN FRANCISCO, (Reuters) – Monday saw Arm Ltd (British chip technology company) announce tools that aim to cut the time it takes for connected devices with the so-called “internet of things”, by around 40%.

The process of creating most modern computing devices involved first developing chips and then hardware, before prototypes were passed to programmers to create code.

Arm released Monday tools to allow makers of the “internet-of-thing” devices (connected traffic control lights, smart appliances) to develop chips and codes simultaneously. This will cut down on the five year time it takes to make a device, which is typically two years.

It supplies blueprints that enable chipmakers in the electronic industry to make physical chips.

Arm will now send these blueprints directly to chipmakers, while simultaneously providing a “virtual version” to cloud computing companies like Amazon.com (NASDAQ)’s Amazon Web Services.

These cloud data centers provide software developers with a virtual chip circuit simulation that they can use to develop their code. At the same time, chipmakers are able to create a physical chip.

This is much better than current systems, which require “hardware farms”, of testing devices for software developers to perfect their code. Mohamed Awad (Vice President of Internet of Things embedded Technologies at Arm), told Reuters.

Amazon, for example, plans to utilize the system to test “Alexa”, the wake-word on connected devices manufactured by third parties.

They support more than 150 Alexa-enabled devices. They would have to set up a hardware farm without it. Awad explained that they can speed up updates by eliminating physical hardware dependencies.