Internet of Things Applications

It’s been almost 10 years since Apple unveiled the iPhone. Since that day, the smartphone has been the overwhelming driver of innovation in the technology industry. Cameras, Wi-Fi, batteries, touch sensors, baseband processors and memory chips — in less than a decade, these components have made stunning advances to keep up with consumer demand to have sleeker, more powerful devices every year.



For chip makers, the pressure has been to produce smaller, more powerful components for each generation of phones. Denser, faster, cheaper — these mantras have driven our industry for as long as most people can remember.

But there’s a new game in town. The smartphone era is not over, but the growth rate is slowing. The key growth driver in hardware could soon be the Internet of Things. Over the next decade, this industry will churn out tens of billions of connected sensor devices. These will be used in every corner of the world — from highways to arteries — to gather new insights to help us live and work better.

This chapter will reshape the technology hardware industry in profound ways, and even reverse many of the changes brought about by the smartphone era. To understand how profound this shift could be, it’s important to know how past markets have shaped the way computers are built.

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New rules in the era of “things”

Let’s look at the Internet of Things. This is the hardware industry of the future, and it will run on billions of sensor devices. But the problem is, these devices will exist in all sorts of environments. Some will live in factories; some will be outside; some will collect data underwater. The basic functionality of these smart nodes is very similar (sense data, collect data, store data, communicate data); however, the deployment requirements vary greatly.

A sensor node in a car engine, for example, will need to withstand high temperatures. Sensor nodes spread across farmland might require powerful radio components to send data over long distances. Most sensors will need to operate at very low power consumption (because they won’t be plugged in), but for some, this will be even more important than others.

Even more confusing, at this point we simply don’t know the exact requirements for most IoT applications. It’s just too early in the process. But we have to start building hardware for it anyway! This presents all kinds of challenges to existing models of chip production.

See more at: techcrunch.com