Semiconductor Solutions for the Internet of Things:The role of Event Detection, Asynchronous Design, Energy Harvesting and Flexible Electronics

G Venkatesh

Abstract


Within the next decade, it is expected that the number of items of common use that would get connected to the Internet would be an order of magnitude higher than the population of humans. This is exciting mainly becauseit means that every object we use would become “smarter” – i.e. that they would be able to sense their context, analyse information locally, co-ordinate with each other, communicate with remote analytics services and take intelligent actions. Such “smartness” would need to be embedded within objects in a reliable and secure way, without significantly adding to its costor energy use. RecentSystem on Chip (SoC) solutions released from a number of semiconductor companies claim to meet precisely these requirements.This paper highlights four research areas that could make a significant impact on the evolution of such solutions in the future: (a) development of event detection mechanisms to closely match the activity within the SoC to that of its context, so that its energy use is minimized (b) use of asynchronous design techniques to better manage demand variations within available (energy) resources (c) techniques to harvest energy from the object’s immediate environment and (d) ways to seamlessly embed these solutions into the end object by leveraging advancements in printed and flexible electronics


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