7 technology shifts to impact us: from smartphones, cloud, IoT and more

by Guru Ganesan

Last year witnessed the launch of a product concept, which could well be a harbinger of a new class of devices. The product was a Smart Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) enabled insulin delivery pen. The pen can track dosage and communicate with any smart device. What is impressive about this device is that it doesn’t have a battery. It’s an energy harvesting, smart insulin pen. The action of getting the dosage ready (including removing the lid) creates enough energy for the device to complete the tasks needed for one use. What’s even more impressive is that it has a microprocessor inside. It uses a tiny ARM Cortex-M0; the same processor which can be found in the Arduino Zero, the BBC Micro-bit and many other products, and which use a tiny amount of energy.

Ultra-low power radios and today’s power sipping processors will let the world think very differently. The world can now truly think thin, think battery-less and think disposable.

There are a number of technology shifts, which have made products and ideas like these possible. We may have overlooked a few due to how mainstream they’ve become, but they are shifts nonetheless.

Here, we list seven.

The smartphone is now our primary processing device Our smartphones are constantly working with data and handling several other tasks. Compared to high-end phones of 2009, the high-end phones in 2015 had 80 times more computing capacity and 158 times the GPU performance. Our smartphones, by the sheer virtue of being so accessible, have become our primary compute devices.

Shift from 8-bit logic to 32-bit intelligence Designers are opting to use 32-bit microcontrollers and have moved away from 8-bit or 16-bit processors, even for simple applications. With more processing capability and superior code density, 32-bit devices make it easier to create intelligent applications and even upgrade them in the future. For example a street light module could in the future be upgraded to measure weather, triangulate positions of ambulances and track traffic flow.

Printed circuit boards are becoming chips Unlike PCBs where much of the design is exposed and can easily be reverse engineered, a System-On-Chip, is much harder to decode. Owing to this, many PCB manufacturers are converting their PCB designs into a single system on chip. Besides reducing area and bill of materials, a chip approach provides much better protection & profitability.

Cloud is coming to data With the number of mobile devices growing significantly, network operators are looking at better ways to handle data throughput and processing demands. Instead of having data processing only in the server, with the network acting as a simple pipe, many providers are looking at adding storage and processing capacity across network nodes. With this addition, cloud will be coming closer to where data is being consumed, offering improved flexibility and significantly reducing network demands.

End-to-end IoT platforms… and secure microcontrollers chat cost less than a Dollar There is plenty of innovation in the IoT space, but designers of IoT devices may or may not have a thorough understanding of security. In IoT, security needs to be built in from the ground up. Many chip companies offer microprocessor based products which have a trusted zone for execution of security related software and protection of secure assets. This separation ring fences the security code, data and peripherals from the wider system and helps prevents security breaches. This trusted security zone is coming to microcontrollers and will make it much easier for developers to create secure and efficient IoT nodes. Sensor to server security enabled IoT platforms like mbed.com, are now also available for designers so they can focus on innovation.

Efficient servers The technology, which has powered the mobile and embedded revolution, is now seeing adoption at the high-end spectrum in areas of servers and high performance computing. This shift has occurred both due to the power efficiency that these processors provide and because the way we consume data, has changed drastically. Developers and data centres have now more options to create a server profile that is optimised for the specific load behaviour.

Cars becoming supercomputers Autonomous and semi-autonomous self-driving cars are gaining momentum at a pace. The capacity to take real-time decisions requires an enormous amount of compute power. Earlier this year saw the launch of a computing platform specifically targeted for autonomous cars. This platform, roughly the size of a small set-top box has a computing capacity of around 150 high-end laptops.

Technology shifts like these will continue to occur, radically changing the way we live and interact with our world.

The author is President and Managing Director, ARM India.