Drone leaders form small UAV coalition

Amazon is going on the offensive as it seeks federal approval to test its planned Prime Air drone delivery system, USA Today reports. Though you may not receive a drone-delivered package this year, the online retailer is making moves to spur development.

To facilitate drone use, Amazon recently came together with several makers of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to create a coalition. Writing for USA Today, Mike Snider explains that such efforts are necessary given the fact that the advancement of commercial drones spans across several federal agencies including the FAA, which governs airspace, and the FCC, with oversight of communications frequencies drones would use. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy also has rules in the works regarding privacy.

“Amazon Prime Air is participating in several groups… that share Congress’ goal of getting small UAVs flying commercially in the United States safely and soon,” said Paul Misener, Amazon Vice President of Global Public Policy.

For many, the term “drone” seems to conjure images of military use and war weaponry. As a result, the mere thought of these futuristic flying devices tends to pose security and privacy concerns to several people. When, however, UAVs used for defense purposes and those that may one day may buzz around the skies are quite different, and in fact, may change the world — for the better. According to ex-Wired editor and 3D Robotics CEO Chris Anderson, the (AVR-powered) DIY drone community will soon have more than 15,000 drones flying, compared to some 7,000 drones in use worldwide by military forces. Martha Stewart, known by many for her expertise in and around the home, has also shared her love for these flying robots in an essay that appeared on TIME Magazine’s website on July 29th, writing that drones could be “a useful tool.”

“This is uncharted territory,” says Anderson, Co-Founder of 3D Robotics. His firm recently announced that it had joined Amazon, Aerialtronics, Airware, DJI Innovations, Google[x], GoPro and Parrot in founding the small UAV coalition, which aspires to represent commercial uses of drones, establish a code of conduct and educate the public about benefits of the technology. “They [Amazon] have a well-established presence in Washington and they were able to kick-start the mechanics of this coalition so we could quickly join and get moving.” Anderson added that companies need a “safe sandbox” to begin testing applications.

Globally, drone spending is expected to increase from $6.4 billion this year to $11.5 billion annually a decade from now, as projected by aerospace and defense industry research firm the Teal Group. Both Amazon and the new coalition have retained Washington, D.C. law firm Akin Gump to assist in lobbying efforts. The online retail giant is already among two dozen other companies that have sought exemptions from the FAA to begin tests with drones that weigh less than 55 pounds and fly below 400 feet, USA Today reveals.

In its filing to the FAA, Amazon said that so far it has only been able to test its drones inside its Seattle R&D lab or in other countries. Its goal is to get packages to customers in 30 minutes or less via the rotor-powered flying machines. “One day, seeing Amazon Prime Air will be as normal as seeing mail trucks,” wrote Amazon’s v Misener in the filing.

“A number of companies are looking at getting into philanthropic purposes,” explains Michael Drobac, one of the lobbyists at Akin Gump. “They’re also looking at recreational uses, mapping and aerial photography — the possibilities are limitless.”

Drone potential goes far beyond package delivery; in fact, we recently listed 18 amazing ways the aerial vehicles are already being used today. Interested in learning more about drone use and the formation of the coalition? Read the entire USA Today article here.

 

 

Medical tech surging with the Internet of Things

Medical devices are proliferating at a bewildering pace. My pal Frank Fowler sent this YouTube video of how you can use your smartphone to take an EKG or monitor your vitals. Of course, we engineers know that the phone is just a passive display, the real action is in the sensors, signal conditioning and wireless tech used to get the signals to the cloud. It’s an embedded world and consumers are going to be blown away by all the useful products that we engineers will be bringing them. In addition to the pillars of microcontrollers and wireless, Atmel is committed to bringing security chips to market too. For medical applications like this, security is more than a nice feature; it may be a regulatory requirement to insure your data remains private.

The video demonstrates a little misunderstanding that the iPhone is in any way central to this. All it is doing is displaying data. It is the sensors and signal conditioning that are the real revolution. The late Jim Williams designed a scale so accurate it can measure your heartbeat (Fig 11). So a buddy of his quit Apple and did a startup where you put a pad under your mattress and it measures your heart-rate while you sleep. Once the embedded system gets the data, you can send it wirelessly to your TV or your phone or to the cloud cloud cloud. To think the iPhone is central to this is like thinking the box on your wall is the central part of making a TV program.

What is fascinating to me is how things just seem to work out. We will need storage for all this, and how convenient that Hitachi Data Systems, where my buddy Fowler used to work, makes boxes full of spinners that will hold all this information. In fact, when considering the cloud cloud cloud, it occurred to me that the suitable analogy is electricity production. Data is good. Electricity is good. We used to have a little generator in the basement. We used to have a little server in the basement. That was a pain, so we moved all the generators and servers to one central location. All that the cloud cloud cloud is doing is combining all the little generators into one big one, something the electricity people did 100 years ago. Soon the data people will go back to the mainframe, since why do all this dynamic load balancing across 5000 machines when you can do it across 50? And this is the great brilliant progress of our modern age. Indeed the cloud cloud cloud is almost irrelevant to the user. I don’t care if Dreamhost has one machine or a million, as long as they send out the pages quickly. The cloud cloud cloud helps that to a point, but it also lessens reliability and adds overhead. We live in wondrous times.

While stuffing blades into a web server and dynamically balancing them is neat, of far more interest to me is the embedded world. Here there is a delightful design challenge, getting low power to balance with high performance. My programmer pal John Haggis was showing off his Omron blood pressure monitor the other day;

This Omron blood pressure monitor can take your vitals in less than a minute.

The next task will be to connect the monitor to you phone via Bluetooth or Wi-fi. Now your phone can send the data up to the internet where it can be stored, analyzed, and shared with your doctor. You can envision the network effects taking hold, where your blood pressure results will dynamically modify the shopping list at your grocery store. If your blood pressure is low enough, maybe you can have some salty snacks this week. Keep it low and you might get a rebate on your health or life insurance. If your blood pressure shoots up the IoT can correlate it to that restaurant where you had a meal that caused it.

 

Electronic component art sculptures

My pal Phil Sittner sent a link to this picture of a rock band made out of electronic components. You have to love the title: L.E.D. Zeppelin.

Apparently that picture inspired this mom to make her own art:

All this creativity is near and dear to my heart, since my dear departed analog pal Jim Williams was also a lover of electronic art. One nice feature of Jim’s art was that it often functioned as a real working circuit as well as being a free-form sculpture.

So if you have an artistic bent, think about soldering up some items from your junk box to make something beautiful and fascinating.

The ABCs of ECDSA (Part 2)

Part 2 of The ABCs of ECDSA (“Sign-Here”) will describe how digital certificates are made and signed. In the previous article (The ABCs of ECDSA: Part 1), we examined the steps of ECDSA performing asymmetric authentication using digital certificates. You may have noticed that both Part 1 and Part 2 are in reverse chronological order; however, it makes better sense to first understand a bit about the actual authentication process before dissecting the details of making the certificate. (Just trust me on that.) Before we get into the nuances of the certificate, let’s recall that authentication is about keeping something real. Such things would be mobile, medical and consumer accessories; embedded firmware; industrial networks; and soon the new platforms of IoT, home automation, and vehicle-to-vehicle communications. Aside from those, there are several others given the fact that the need for authentication is increasing exponentially as more things communicate with each other, and through the cloud, are creating more opportunities for bad actors to apply their mal-intent.

Especially with the increased use of the Internet and the cloud for financial transactions and transmission of confidential personal/medical information, it’s critical to ensure that the sender of information is exactly who they are supposed to be, as well as that the data has not been tampered with. That is where authentication and hardware key storage come in. Here we will focus on asymmetric authentication. Asymmetric authentication using ECDSA is based upon a digital certificate, which in this case, is stored in the ATECC108A device.

So, now let’s go into the chip factory and see how the ECDSA certificate is made and stored in the device. Remember that ECDSA stands for Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm. The words “Elliptic Curve” are in the name because Elliptic Curve Cryptography (“ECC”) algorithms are used. No mystery there. The benefit of ECC is that it provides extremely strong security with shorter key lengths than other popular algorithms. Bitcoin, for example uses ECC predominantly for that reason.   (We won’t go into Bitcoin here.) “DSA” points to the fact that digital signatures are the key element of the process, which is also fairly self evident. The digital signing process is what we describe here, step by step. “Certificate” is the name given to the concept of putting certain types of data together in a prescribed format and then signing that data using hashing algorithms and signing algorithms. (Again, the usage of the certificate is covered in Part 1.)

While we are fully immersed here in cryptographic alphabet soup, we might as well add one more thing to it: The prescribed format used in the ECDSA in the ATECC108A is called ASN.1. ASN.1 basically defines what is what in the certificate, including the serial number, the public key and that sort of thing. It also defines the length of those data elements.

Now, back to building the certificate: The certificate is made and loaded in the key storage device in the chip factory. It is made from two main components:

1. The certificate data 
2. The signature

The certificate data is a collection of data from three sources:

1. Static data: Boiler plate type data that does not change, such as the name and address of the manufacturer. (This is the ASN.1 encoded stuff.)
2. Dynamic data: Data from the tester that can change with each device such as time, date, and serial number.
3. Client device’s public key, which has an algorithmic relationship to the client’s private key that will be securely stored in the client device.

The certificate data is formatted according to X.509 specifications (yes, more crypto jargon). X.509 defines the elements and order of the elements in the certificate, such as  serial number, public key, subject’s common name (i.e. the name of the certificate), authority ID (normally a SHA-1 hash of the public key), authority common name (i.e. the name of the authority that signs the certificate data), among other things. We will leave more about X.509 for another day.

The certificate data comprises just half of the certificate, the other half is the signature. What is a little tricky to understand at first is that the certificate data do two things: (1) become part of the certificate as it is, and (2) gets hashed and signed to make the signature. Both the certificate data itself and the signature make up the certificate.

The specific steps in order to make the signature begins with a copy of the certificate data being put through a hash algorithm to create a number called a hash value (or digest). ECDSA specifies a 32 byte digest length and SHA256 as the hashing algorithm. Once created, the digest is ready to be signed by the sign module in the factory.

The sign module is a piece of equipment that securely stores the signer’s private key. No one can get access to that key. The sign module uses the ECC sign algorithm to sign the digest of the certificate data with the signer’s private key. The result of that process becomes the “signature.” The signature then joins the original (i.e. unhashed) certificate data to complete the certificate. Note that the signing key is tied to the OEM’s root key to create the root of trust (the notion of root of trust will be addressed in another article).

The certificate is now finished and can be installed into the crypto device. Once the device is finished, it is then shipped to the customer’s factory to be assembled into an accessory, consumable, board or any number of things, i.e. a consumable water filter that later gets installed into refrigerator. In this scenario, when a new filter is installed by the consumer into the refrigerator when the old filter expires, the new filter will be authenticated by the host processor in the refrigerator according to the ECDSA process as described in The ABCs of ECDSA (Part 1).

Below is a video (sorry, no sound) that will visually help walk you through the steps noted above.

Benefits of asymmetric authentication with ECDSA include:

• Increased security because asymmetric authentication does not need secure key storage on the host (only the client)
• No need to update the host with secrets in the field (can update the public key at any time.)
• Uses the advantages of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (high security, short key, less computation)

Atmel CryptoAuthentication™ products such as Atmel’s ATSHA204A, ATECC108A  and ATAES132 implement hardware-based storage, which is much stronger then software based storage because of the defense mechanisms that only hardware can provide against attacks. Secure storage in hardware beats storage in software every time. Adding secure key storage is an inexpensive, easy, and ultra-secure way to protect firmware, software, and hardware products from cloning, counterfeiting, hacking, and other malicious threats. 

If you have yet to read the first portion of this article, you can find The ABCs of ECDSA (Part 1) here.

 

 

 

Report: IoT to become multitrillion-dollar market by 2020

As previously reported in Bits & Pieces, the potential for the Internet of Things (IoT) is pretty clear. By 2020, Cisco forecasts that there will be approximately 50 billion devices connected to the Internet, while IDC analysts project the worldwide market for IoT solutions will rise from $1.9 trillion in 2013 to a staggering $7.1 trillion. According to a recent survey from PwC, enterprises are now turning to sensors for many of the same reasons that they would adopt most technologies, such as greater efficiency. As a result the study has found that more companies are embarking on the gradual but massive adoption of the IoT, particularly investing in sensors to collect data, which is then wirelessly sent for further analysis or alerts.

The survey entitled, “Sensing the future of the Internet of Things,” reveals the ways in which the ever-evolving IoT is transforming the everyday physical objects that surround us into an ecosystem of information that will enrich our lives. “From refrigerators to parking spaces to houses, the IoT is bringing more and more things into the digital fold every day, which will likely make the IoT a multi-trillion dollar industry in the near future.”

“While the IoT represents the convergence of advances in miniaturization, wireless connectivity, increased data storage capacity and batteries, the IoT wouldn’t be possible without sensors,” PwC reports. “Sensors detect and measure changes in position, temperature, light, etc. and they are necessary to turn billions of objects into data-generating ‘things’ that can report on their status, and in some cases, interact with their environment. Because sensor endpoints fundamentally enable the IoT, sensor investments are an early indicator of the IoT’s progress.” According to PwC’s 6th Annual Digital IQ survey of nearly 1,500 business and technology executives, the IoT movement appears to be well underway.

The study found that 20% of companies are investing in IoT sensors, up from 17% last year. In addition 54% of top performers (survey respondents whose companies are in the top quartile for revenue growth, profitability, and innovation) said that they will be investing more in sensors this year, while 14% of the respondents claim that sensors are top strategic importance to their companies in the next three to five years.

Writing for Wired Innovation Insights, PWC’s Chris Curran explains that in the coming years, “Businesses will augment their operations, adding connected sensors to people, places, processes and products to gather and analyze information to make better decisions. I call this phenomenon the Internet of Business Things (IoBT).”

The Internet of Things can help consumers achieve goals by greatly improving their decision-making capacity via the augmented intelligence of the IoT, PwC notes. “For businesses, the IoBT helps companies achieve enhanced process optimization and efficiencies by collecting and reporting on data collected from the business environment.”

“Already, we’re seeing companies use sensors to track the movement of customers and employees who serve them. Product and shelf sensors are feeding inventory algorithms so businesses can replenish supplies exactly when they need to. Machines are being developed to detect when an employee isn’t properly trained and will shut down in response to an inadequately trained operator. Robots are coming to market to not replace workers, but to augment their work by sensing and assisting. Companies are even putting sensors on employees and in conference rooms to learn how to build better teams and to more efficiently balance real estate use between individual and shared space,” Curran adds.

Sensors are important in providing this so-called business intelligence to customers, as the data gathered enables them make better, faster decisions, in areas like business processes, supply chain and customer experience. The survey also went on to highlight the top 10 industries currently investing in sensors. Among the most notable included energy and mining (33%), power and utilities (32%), automotive (31%), industrial (25%) and hospitality (22%).

For those interested in learning more, you can access the entire PwC report here.

Chip Design Mag goes 1:1 with Jacko Wilbrink

ARM recently announced that it had licensed processor and security IP to Atmel for use in devices requiring image, video and display capabilities. The license includes the ARM Cortex®-A7 processor, ARM Mali™-V500 video accelerator, Mali-DP500 display processor and ARM TrustZone® technology, which can now be integrated into a variety of wearable devices, toys and even automated factory tasks reliant on image processing.

The energy efficiency and small die area of the ARM Mali-V500 and Mali-DP500 enables full HD 1080p60 resolution capabilities on a single core, reducing the cost for price-sensitive consumer applications. They also both incorporate ARM TrustZone technology for hardware-backed content security from download to display, which is becoming more important as more mobile devices are used for such content downloads.

Following the announcement, Chip Design Mag‘s Caroline Hayes had a chance to sit down with Jacko Wilbrink, Atmel Senior Product Marketing Director, to discuss what the adoption of ARM Mali means for both parties. The interview can be found below.

CH: What existing strengthens will Atmel bring in using the Mali IP?
JW: Low power will remain an important differentiator for Atmel MPUs including those embedding Mali IPs going forward. The Mali IPs will bring smartphone and tablet experience and applications to many products including power sensitive user interface centric wearable and battery operated products.

CH: What markets will the licensed IP address, e.g. wearables?
JW: With the cost of TFT displays coming down and the demand from consumers to improve the user interface/user experience of a fast growing range of products beyond smartphones and tablets, there is a growing need for MPUs with graphical processing and video capabilities. Industrial graded products with long life support, professional documentation and support are important benefits Atmel offers over alternative multi-core ASSPs designed for smartphones and tablets.

CH: What architectural features of Mali will be used in these areas?
JW: The licensed IPs allow Atmel to scale up their MPUs in performance and functionality including 3D graphics, HD video decoding and encoding and efficient memory bandwidth usage. The multi-core Cortex-A cores offer the ability to optimize the price performance point while maximizing software reuse across an Atmel MPU platform.

CH: What benefits of the Mali architecture will be exploited initially and how?
JW: Full compliance with video and graphics standards is critical for our customers. Power efficiency, Android support and efficient memory usage and bus bandwidth optimization are important benefits offered by the Mali IPs.

CH: When will the first Mali-based devices be rolled out?
JW: The first design is planned to sample to early customers by the end of 2015.

To learn more about the collaboration, you can find the original announcement here.

Exploring the Internet of Things and wearable tech market

Earlier this year, my wife and I drove to Southern California in search of information on the wearable computing market. After stops in Irvine, San Diego, and some play time in La Jolla we returned in time for the CASPA Symposium: “The Wearable Future: Moving Beyond the Hype; the Search for the Holy Grail and Practical Use Cases.” CASPA is the Chinese American Semiconductor Professionals Association and their Spring Symposium was at the Intel HQ Auditorium in Santa Clara with a standing room only crowd.

The big attraction for me was the keynote speaker Dr. Reza Kazerounian, SVP & GM, Microcontroller Business Unit of Atmel. I originally ran across his name during my research for “A Brief History of STmicroelectronics” (the piece I did last week) as he was CEO of ST Americas from 2000 to 2009. It was truly an honor to hear Dr. Reza Kazerounian speak.

“The Internet of Things (IoT) is opening up fresh horizons for a new generation of intelligent systems that leverage contextual computing and sensing platforms, creating new markets. One of these platforms is the wearable category of devices, where the combination of sensors using low-power sensor fusion platforms, and short-range wireless connectivity, are giving rise to a variety of exciting end markets. From self-quantification to a variety of location-based applications, to remote health monitoring, wearables are becoming the harbinger for a whole host of services. With the right set of biometric sensors combined with local fast data analytics, wearables have the potential to revolutionize the health care industry. These devices can provide real-time data and contextual information along with all the health care requirements, improving the quality of care, and lowering the overall cost of care. This discussion will review the underlying technologies needed to make the “always-on health care revolution” happen, and explore how the future of medicine is being shaped by wearable devices.”

Contextual computing is the key term here and, yes, I had to look it up. The application I’m most interested in, besides fitness, is security. I want my smartphone to know it is me holding it by my movements, voice, and usage. I remember back when my credit card kept getting security flagged when I started traveling internationally. Once Visa profiled my usage it never happened again. As the smartphone takes over our financial lives, security will be even more critical, absolutely.

There are three key components to wearable market silicon: Low power, low cost, and low area. Billions of these devices will be deployed over the next 10 years so the market will by far exceed smartphones. The wearable market will be very fragmented which opens up opportunities for entrepreneurs around the world. In fact, Dr. Kazerounian predicted that 15% of those devices will come from companies that are less than 3 years old to which I agree wholeheartedly.

One of the big challenges is low power connectivity. For now these devices will be talking to our smartphones and that means ultra-low power connectivity. Coincidentally, Atmel recently announced a new SmartConnect family that combines Atmel’s ultra-low power MCUs with its wireless solutions and complementary software into a single package:

“Ultra-low power wireless connectivity is critical for embedded applications in the era of the Internet of Things,” said Reza Kazerounian, Sr. Vice President and General Manager, Microcontroller Business Unit, Atmel Corporation. “Atmel’s SmartConnect technology is about simplifying the use of embedded wireless connectivity technologies and enabling users to accelerate their time-to-market. This simplicity allows all players to participate in the IoT market, fueling the innovation needed to accelerate adoption.”

Celebrating their 30th year, Atmel is an IoT market leader with an interesting history that you can read about it here. 

This post has been republished with permission from SemiWiki.com, where Daniel Nenni is a featured blogger. It first appeared there on Marcn 9, 2014.

What will smartphones look like in 2020?

Thanks to Moore’s Law, electronic devices are increasingly packed with more power and functionality, improving our life qualities with more convenience, productivity, and entertainment. Just to put things in perspective, Steve Cichon of Trending Buffalo shows that an iPhone (assuming an iPhone 5S at the beginning of 2014, when his blog was written) can replace $3,054.82 worth of electronics sold in Radio Shack in 1991, according to a flyer post in The Buffalo News.

“It’s nothing new, but it’s a great example of the technology of only two decades ago now replaced by the 3.95 ounce bundle of plastic, glass, and processors in our pockets,” says Steve Cichon.

As cool as we think our smartphones are today, I dare to say that two decades later by 2035, when people compare their personal electronics (assuming they don’t use the term “smartphones” anymore!) against the current smartphone features, they would be amazed by how big, heavy and slow these electronics are today. If you still don’t get what I mean, take a look at this 1991 Sony Walkman Commercial, and try to recall how cool the Walkman was in 1991.

While I certainly do not have the crystal ball that tells me what kind of personal electronic devices people will be using by 2035, I would like to make a few guesses of what smartphones would look like in just 5 years, say 2020.

User Interface

I believe touchscreen [with touchscreen controllers] will still be the main user interface for smartphones by 2020. While Generation Z are called “digital natives,” I think kids who are born after Generation Z would be “touch natives.” Toddlers and young children playing with iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad today will attempt to touch all display interfaces as their way of interacting with electronics in the coming years. I also believe smartphone interfaces would expand beyond just touch, and there are two possible expansions within five years: gesture controls and voice commands.

Gesture control refers to hand or facial interactions with the smartphone.  Samsung’s Galaxy S4 (with Air View) and Amazon’s Fire Phone (with 4 corner cameras) made interesting attempts for enabling hand and facial gesture recognition, but unfortunately, these features were not very successfully adopted by consumers because they were hard to learn, limited by hardware capabilities, and unreliable or inconsistent to use. But smartphone OEMs will continue improve their designs, and smartphones will eventually be capable of reliably recognize our intentions by tracking our hand or eyeball motions, or facial expressions.

Voice command is widely popular today, but will become a lot more useful in five years. Think of Apple’s Siri, Google’s Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana, as cloud computing becomes more artificial intelligent with more data and computational power, they will become more dependable for average consumers to adapt. I hope that by 2020, my daily commutes with Apple’s Siri will no longer be worse than talking to my 2-year old son — Siri will help me change FM radio channels or launch a Podcast via Carplay in my dashboard. I will also be able to ask Google Now to order a pizza for me (topped with bacon, pepperoni and sausage, of course) without directly talking to the pizza-shop guy. Google Now will tell me when the pizza might arrive (based on the traffic congestion conditions), and open the door for me through my Nest, which as a Bluetooth connection to my front door’s electronic lock.

Integration

Needless to say, smartphones will be further integrated come the year 2020. Smartphone integration will follow a much similar path as the PC’s integration, except it will take place A LOT faster. Integration doesn’t always mean electronic components will disappear; rather, it can also mean that more hardware performance is integrated into the device. Today’s leading smartphones are packed with a Quad- or Octa-core Application Processor, running between 1.3 to 2.5GHz. By 2020, I’m guessing that smartphone CPUs will be 8 to 16-cores, running between 2.5-4.0 GHz range, (they probably will eat today’s Intel Core i7, designed for high-performance PCs, for lunch.)with 8-10GB RAM and 500-750 GB of storage.

I also believe smartphones will integrate more hardware components for better “context-awareness.” Today’s leading smartphones are easily packed with 10 sensors — gyro, ambient light, accelerometer, barometer, hall sensor, finger scanner, heart rate monitor, among a number of others. I think more microphones (today’s camera usually has at least two microphones) and cameras (again, at least two today) will be packed into the devices to enable improved awareness — 4, 6 or even 8 microphones and cameras are quite possible by 2020. For instance, having multiple microphones enables listening from different positions inside the phone and at different frequencies (i.e. not only voice commands); in addition, it will allow the smartphone to determine its location, its surroundings (whether inside or out) how far it is away from the voice command and even how to improve noise cancellation. Also, having multiple cameras will allow the device to better track facial expressions (Amazon’s Fire Phone is a good example), to capture better 3D and panorama images, or to refocus photos by post-processing (hTC One M8 is a good example).

Further, component-level integration will continue to happen. With increasing applications processor power, the A/P will be able to take over many digital processing from discrete components inside the phone, although I think Sensor Hub will continue to drive low-power, context-awareness tasks while the A/P sleeps.

Display Technology

Do you envision 4K displays (i.e.3840 x 2160) on your smartphone? Today, Apple’s “Retina Display” in the iPhone 5S offers a 326 pixel-per-inch, and many new smartphone displays exceed that pixel density. Smartphone displays are increasing in sizes, moving from 3.2″ and 4″ just a few years ago to 4.7″, 5.2″, 5.5″ and even 6.4”. As the screen sizes increase, as will the display resolution, while keeping the high PPI density.

I think both LCD and AMOLED displays will continue to exist in 2020, as both technologies have their advantages and disadvantages for smartphone applications. From a consumer perspective, I would expect both types of displays to improve on resolution, color accuracy (for example, Xiaomi’s latest Mi4 display has a color gamut covering 84% of the NTSC range, and that’s even better than Apple’s iPhone 5S display), power consumption and thinner assembly allowing for slimmer industrial design.

As smartphones with 2K displays be introduced by the end of 2014, it isn’t unreasonable to say that 4K displays would be used in smartphones, perhaps by or even before 2020.  However, everything has a cost, and the extra pixels that our human eye cannot resolve will consume power from the graphic engine. Would you prefer to trade off some pixel densities with longer battery life? Personally, I think we do not need a 4K smartphone screen. (And yet, I may laugh at myself saying this when we look back five years from now.)

Battery Technology

The thirst for more power is always there. With increased processing capabilities, context-awareness and better display technologies, we can only assume that future smartphones will require more power than what they are carrying today. Today’s top-tier smartphones can package a battery around 3000 mAh. That’s plenty of juice for a day, but consumers always crave for longer battery life or more powerful smartphones with longer video streaming time. Luckily, research on new battery technologies have been increased, thanks to the explosion of portable electronics. I believe there are two types of technologies that will be available and improve our smartphone experiences by 2020:

Battery with higher density: Forbes recently reported that a group of researchers at Stanford University designed a new solution to increase the capacity of existing battery technology by 400%. This is just one of the promising researches we’ve seen in recent years that could one day be deployed for mass production in just a few years. For the same size of battery that lasts for a day of use in 2014, we can expect that smartphones will last for a week without charging by 2020. On the other hand, smartphone OEMs can also select to use a smaller size battery in the smartphone, and in exchange, use the extra room inside the smartphone to integrate other components and features.

Battery with rapid charging capabilities: A gadget-lover’s dream is to get a full-charge of their smartphones within 5 minutes of charging. Today, UNU’s Ultrapak battery pack can deliver a full charge to devices after just 15 minutes of charging itself up. This isn’t to say the technology is ready for smartphone integration, due to various reasons; however, we’re seeing smartphones adopting rapid charging technologies today (such as Oppo’s Find 7) and we should expect that smartphones will have a much shorter charge time thanks to various rapid-charging standards, such as Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 2.0. Several smartphone models have adopted this standard, including Xiaomi’s Mi3, Mi4, Samsung Galaxy S5 and hTC One M8.

Smartphone Camera

Last but certainly not least, I think smartphone cameras will certainly undergo many improvements by 2020. In fact, the smartphone camera performance is one of the features driving smartphone sales. A safe and simple prediction is that camera’s pixel density would continue to increase as CMOS sensor technology advances. Today, Microsoft’s Lumia 1020 has 41 megapixels, yet I don’t see an average consumer needing that many pixels even by 2020. Personally, I would be very happy with a camera that offers 15-20 megapixel — good photographers understand that pixel isn’t the only determining factor for a good camera, as it is only one of the key aspects.

I am not expecting the camera in a smartphone is capable of optical zooming. Instead, I’d much rather have a smartphone that’s light and portable. In fact, today’s smartphone cameras are pretty good by themselves, but there are always improvements can be made. I think the iPhone 5S cameras can be better with image stabilization, the Galaxy S4 camera can be better with faster start-up and better low-light sensitivity, and the hTC One M8 camera can be designed better with more pixels and improved dynamic contrasting.

Here is a my wishlist for a smartphone camera that I would carry around in 2020, and it’s perhaps not the “2020 Edition of Lumia 1020” camera:

• 20 megapixel with Image Stabilization, perhaps a wide, f/1.0 aperture
• HDR, Panorama view
• Excellent white balance and color accuracy
• Excellent low-light sensitivity
• Full manual control
• Extremely short start-up latency, and fast and accurate auto-focus
• 4K video recording @ 120fps (with simultaneous image recording)

I may not be a fortune teller, but there you go… that’s my prediction for what a smartphone will look like in the year 2020. Would you be interested in spending your hard-earned dough in 2020 for a smartphone with the above spec? Everyone has an opinion on what the future entails, and my idea of a smartphone five years from now are as good as those of the readers of this blog. I think we would all agree that the advancements in technology will continue to improve the quality of lives. As smartphones become more personal and depend ended upon, we’ll all reap the benefits from the smartphone evolution.

 

The Internet of Things and energy conservation

Humans are creative, and adaptive. We’ve done it all our lives, and all our existence. We needed more food, and so we created agriculture. We needed to live together, and so we created architecture. We needed to communicate, and so we created hundreds of ways to do just that; Internet, mobile telephone networks, computers. We are so fond of computers that we have them everywhere, often without noticing them. Yes, you might have a bulky desktop computer at home, or maybe even a flashy new laptop, but those are not the only computers. Your mobile telephone is a computer, but technically, so is your microwave, your car, your television set, and even your washing machine.

Our lives have changed greatly. We’ve all seen pictures and even films of medieval castles, and we know how we used to live. Today, our lives are made more comfortable by scores of machines; when was the last time you washed your clothes by hand? The clothes go in the washing machine, then in the dryer, and then in the cupboard. This all comes at a cost; financially, of course, but also in terms of energy.

Energy. The art of creating electrical power and delivering it to our homes and cities. For most people, this is as simple as having overhead power lines here and there, and paying a bill at the end of the month. Unfortunately, it is much more complicated than that. Power stations require scores of people to operate, and something surprising, data. In France, we have “too many” power stations, and most run at low capacity. When it gets hot, those who have air conditioning like to put it on, consuming electricity. Multiply that by a few thousand, and you get an idea of how much energy the power station needs to produce. When it gets cold, people like to heat their homes and businesses, and since everyone has radiators, electrical consumption soars. Imagine the amount of radiators an entire city can contain, and imagine even 50% of them turned on at the same time. Imagine.

Data is needed from other sources, not just from the weather. Imagine the amount of power required to let all the football fans watch the world cup. Our problem is that we can generate electricity, but we cannot store it (at least, not on this kind of scale). When everything gets turned on, the power station must be able to respond. If it can’t, bad things happen; the lights dim, or sometimes everything goes dark. We now know we cannot live without electricity.

We all know that we need to reduce our energy dependence, even if some of us don’t want to. To make more people aware, some cities turn off all the lights for an hour. It’s called Earth Hour. For one hour, people are encouraged to use as little electricity as possible; turning off the lights, for example. This does have an impact, but it is a double-edged sword. For one hour, the electricity usage drops considerably, while everyone thinks about the planet, and what we will leave behind for our children. At the end of the hour, everything goes back on, and this is where things get tricky. When electrical devices are first turned on, some can generate what is called an energy spike; a large consumption at first, before something more stable. It is visible just after Earth Hour, but it actually happens every day.

Peak hours. In my house, my electric water heater is connected to a peak-hour detection system. At 11:30 PM, my electricity provider starts “off-peak” hours, a time where electricity costs less. It costs less, an incentive to make me use power-hungry devices at a time when other devices are not needed. At this time of night, most businesses are closed, and so there is less demand. It is all about normalizing energy requirements, and to stop peaks during the day. At 7:30 AM, peak hours start, the water heater turns off, businesses start up, and my kettle turns on, the day is about to begin.

Energy is available, that isn’t the problem. Our problem is our use of energy. If only we had a way of using energy when it was available. Imagine, a certain amount of energy available. When I need light, I want my light to be usable immediately. I need a start time; now. However, when I put my clothes in the washing machine generally, I need them to be ready for the next day. I need and “end” time; I need the device to get the work done before a certain time. When will the washing machine start? Well, I don’t actually mind when it starts, and this is where I need help. This is where the IoT can help us, because we really need help.

The IoT will give us millions of connected sensors. This will also supply us with data, lots and lots of it. Why wouldn’t a small device in my house have direct control over my washing machine, or even better, actually be inside my washing machine? It could be programmed to start at a specific time, talking to other devices on the energy grid? Or even in my home; it could tell the water heater to wait until it has finished, and then the water heater gets its chance. The possibilities are endless.

IoT will give us an incredible amount of data, and data that can be used to help up control, and maybe even overcome our need to energy. But wait a minute, doesn’t the IoT itself need energy? It does, but the amount of energy that it will save outweighs the amount of energy it uses, and by a large factor. Take, for example, Atmel’s SAM D21 microcontroller. It uses less than 70µA per MHz, and that is when it is running at full speed. Of course, these devices have advanced power management, and with careful coding, they can last for months on cell batteries. Low power does not mean no power; it has enough flex to get the job done, and more. With built-in USB, ADCs, DACs and enough RAM and ROM for the most complex programs, it gets the job done. It also has the Atmel Event system, a powerful system that lets the microcontroller react to external events without the need to constantly look at inputs.

We need a little help in our lives to make simple decisions; when should I turn the heating on? When is the best time to turn on the air conditioner? We think we know, but we don’t. IoT will allow us to know exactly when the cold weather is coming. IoT will know when to turn the lights off. In short, IoT will generate enough data that it will know better than us what to do, and when. What we have seen so far is only the beginning.

On the road from Makers to consumers

It’s time to break with conventional thinking. For decades, the measure of success for semiconductors has been OEM design wins. Most consumers haven’t known, or cared, about what is inside their electronic gadgets, as long as they work. That may be about to change, because a new intermediary is finding its voice – and being heard in high places.

Intel and Apple, in different ways, began challenging the norm by pursuing consumer branding and developing pull-through demand for their parts as drivers of the overall experience. Coupling what people “feel” about their devices with the technology powering them creates an almost unbreakable bond, akin to a religious response. Reaching billions of people has required billions of dollars and high profile advertising campaigns – out of the question for most embedded semiconductor companies.

A new road is being carved across the landscape, paved not with gigantic chips packing billions of transistors delivering a cascade of social chatter and streaming entertainment content. This road is built with ideas carried on small boards and open source software, and a sense of wonder about how the world works, and what we can do to shape it.

Somewhere on that road right now is a big truck, captured in pixels at a stop in June 2014 that may go down as a turning point in the annals of semiconductor evolution.

Overstated? The truck tour is a tried-and-true mechanism for reaching industrial OEMs, taking hands-on demonstrations to cities far from the sources of silicon and software innovation. If we were only talking about embedded design and the industrial IoT, it’d be business as usual, and this would be just another truck with a fancy paint job and a couple of FAEs inside.

But, it’s not. The industrial IoT is wonderful and welcome, however by and of itself it won’t generate the billions of units needed to drive a recovery and restart growth in semiconductors and the economy at-large. That will only come from reaching and capturing consumers with IoT technology, in a big way.

And that, so far, has proven difficult. After all, even industry experts are feverishly debating the name IoT, questioning what applications really fall under the moniker, or what exactly it means. Much like “smart grid” and “mHealth” before it, the term IoT means something in the developer community, but not so much to consumers who don’t yet see a connection between the Internet and how they use everyday things.

A recent SOASTA survey suggests 73% of the US has never heard of the IoT, at least until an interviewer explains it to them. (I’m curious why that number always seems to be 73% no matter the topic, but let’s just say 3 out of 4 – I believe it.) When hearing oral arguments in the Aereo case earlier this year, several US Supreme Court justices issued queries indicating a limited grasp of technology. (Cut to Keyrock: “I’m just a caveman … your modern ways frighten and confuse me.”)

This isn’t a lack of intelligence on their part; it’s a lack of generating the needed visibility on our part. These are the people we all must reach if we have a hope to succeed. Who is going to reach them? Makers, armed with our tools and their ideas. Atmel and other tech firms reaching Washington and the first-ever White House Maker Faire, side by side with people like the star of Sylvia’s Super-Awesome Maker Show, was a milestone in delivering the message to the masses. This goes way beyond the T and E in STEM; remember, the social transformation was driven by youth, and young makers are going to drive the uptake of the consumer IoT.

Why? Well, frankly speaking, they don’t think like engineers – they think like actual, real-life users. I made the comment recently that we need to be careful, the people we are trying to reach can drive smartphones, not (name of other popular maker module redacted … sorry, Arduino didn’t rhyme.) Don’t be distracted by a 17-foot tall mechatronic giraffe with lava lamps for ears and a penchant for partying, or by the Obama crack about we don’t spell “fair” with an ‘e’ in this country. These are people designing things they, and people like them, want to use. More importantly, they will provide the translation of what the new technology can do, renarrating the story from the language of semiconductor companies to the wants of the average consumer.

Makers are the people we need to win with. That idea isn’t lost on Chrysler, who has co-opted the maker movement as their idea in 2014 commercials. Makers care about what is inside, and they are choosing Atmel in droves – in part because Atmel has redirected technological and social media energy into nurturing them, away from just talking to the button-down, risk-adverse, safety-is-job-one industrial community. Intel and other chip suppliers are feverishly trying to catch the wave with makers, moving away from the “e2e” stance that only takes us so far in this next phase.

It’s not for the faint of heart, or the impatient. The industrial IoT is safe, somewhat predictable ground for experienced firms, whereas the consumer IoT still borders on bubble in many minds. The maker movement is now what the university programs were back when to semiconductor firms, taken to the next level and reaching an even wider audience. Design wins with makers now likely won’t show up in the volume shipments column right away – but, they will show up as consumers get the IoT over time.

This post has been republished with permission from SemiWiki.com, where Don Dingee is a featured blogger. It first appeared there on June 19, 2014.