Vegard Wollan talks about the history of AVR

We were lucky enough to drag Vegard Wollan into the Atmel Studio while he was visiting headquarters from Norway a few weeks ago. For those of you who may not know, Vegard is commonly believed to be the “V” in AVR. After having spent hours in the Studio, we decided to break the film into separate segments — this one is about the history of the AVR. And, what better day to recount the earliest days of the revolutionary microcontroller than Throwback Thursday?

You young whippersnappers might not realize it, but Atmel started life as a memory company. We made EEPROM memory, and soon branched into Flash memory. Vegard and his pal Alf Bogen (the “A” in AVR) met on computer forums while students at Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet, also called NTNU, or the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. They saw the need for a microcontroller based on Flash memory, which you could reprogram as many times as needed, even when it was in-circuit.

AVR inventor Vegard Wollan holds his Master’s thesis from college that began the AVR MCU architecture.

This was at the time where development engineers had to buy expensive ceramic package microcontrollers with a quartz window. You would program the part with your Data IO programmer, and when you had to make any change, you took the part out of its socket and put it in an ultraviolet eraser for 20 minutes. Savagery.

So Vegard and Alf pitched their MCU design to Atmel, who immediately saw the great potential in it. Atmel had already started to make 8051-style MCUs in the Colorado fab facility, which we had just purchased from Honeywell. One great thing about those parts was most instructions executed in one cycle instead of the 4 to 12 that the original 8051 needed.

So when Vegard explained the AVR was a RISC (reduced instruction set) machine designed to execute instruction in one cycle, it was music to Atmel’s ears. You could say that AVR was RISC before RISC was cool. And, it explains why AVR has passionate followers just like ARM-core RISC chips also have passionate followers… I guess that explains why Atmel makes 8- and 32-bit AVR chips, as well as a whole line of Atmel | SMART ARM-based chips.

The other cool thing that this video touches upon is how AVR chips were designed to run C programs well. You might remember the early days, when Intel would make whatever hardware people thought was cool and Microsoft would program in ways that software people thought was cool. Things didn’t always line up. I remember how you had to do a software reboot to take a 80286 out of protected mode, or that “thunking” in Win 95 to switch between 16- and 32-bit.

Vegard is a Renaissance Man that understood the hardware implications of good software design. So he made sure that C code would compile superbly into AVR assembly language. My buddy Wayne Yamaguchi routinely writes C programs for AVR that compile down into a few hundred bytes. AVR is one of those magnificent examples of computer science, not computer “slap this together and push this out so we can sell it”.

Like all Norwegians, Vegard is incredibly modest about his contribution. He credits his co-founder, and the team at Atmel that developed the AVR. But you just have to look at the billions of AVR chips that Atmel has sold to see what a remarkable thing Vegard created. Check out the video and stay tuned for the next installment.

 

 

An LED dress that is a tribute to the Hunger Games

Leslie Birch of Adafruit was recently nominated for “Geek of the Year” in Philadelphia and figured she needed an outfit to woo the tech-savvy crowd at the event. So what immediately came to mind? Recreating the show-stopping flaming dress from The Hunger Games, of course.

Just like Katniss Everdeen, Birch’s goal was to wow her fellow geeks at the gala. She got her hands on a used wedding dress and a petticoat and got to work. With 7-meters of NeoPixel 30 strips at her disposal, the Maker fashionista “removed the weatherproof casing and then soldered the strips together with tiny pieces of Adafruit’s new silicone wire.”

In her post, Birch notes that she slid the NeoPixel strips into the long casing on the petticoat, which not only allowed for illumination, but also created the modern day ‘hoop’ feeling which is perfect for a ball gown. Leslie knew that she wanted her dress to be motion-activated just as the one in the film. In order for the dress to react to a spin, the Maker needed a gyrosensor. After soldering up the wires and attaching it to the back of the ATmega32u4 based FLORA with foam adhesive tape.

To complete the outfit, she cut out a set of wings from craft foam and then covered them in a series of glue, chrome acrylic, and poly. They were not as stiff as she desired, but would be fully functional for her fiery outfit. Imagine combining this dress with the Luciferin necklace from last week? Whoever donned these creations would undoubtedly be mistaken for an extra from the next Hunger Games sequel!

Unfortunately, Leslie didn’t win “Geek of the Year,” but this design is still award winning in our minds!

Purifying water stats with the CleanData-CleanWater sensor

With the validity of many international NGO’s statistics regarding clean water coming under question, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a device to better monitor the water filter use in developing nations.

According to Co:Exist, the CleanData-CleanWater filter attaches directly to a water spigot and once installed, begins tracking filter usage. The embedded device uses a microcontroller to compile data about how long the filter has been used and whether it needs to be replaced.

The CleanData-CleanWater project came about after surveys regarding water filter use in developing nations were questioned. Many respondents would tell researchers that they used filters in their homes, yet they had never truly installed them as they found the process too complicated.

The CleanData-CleanWater lets NGOs and researchers to track precisely how many filters are in use, and how often they are used, all for around $10 a unit. “It allows the NGO to know whether they should invest in more water filters or whether they should invest in training the people to use water filters,” explains David Taylor, a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering at MIT.

Earlier this year, the CleanWater-CleanData project won $10,000 in MIT’s Global Ideas Challenge and will be putting the winnings to fund the first 1,000 sensors. They plan to implement these sensors in Ghana by the end of the calendar year.

1,024 tiny robots assemble into shapes like intelligent insects

Researchers in Harvard’s Self-Organizing Systems Research Group have introduced Kilobots — a 1,024-strong swarm of decentralized cooperating robots that can assemble themselves into complex shapes with very little human input.

A team comprised of Michael Rubenstein, Alejandro Cornejo, and Professor Radhika Nagpal have described their 1,024-robot swarm in a detailed study published in Science. “Each robot has the basic capabilities required for a swarm robot, but is made with low-cost parts, and is mostly assembled by an automated process. In addition, the system design allows a single user to easily and scalably operate a large Kilobot collective, such as programming, powering on, and charging all robots systems,” the researchers explain.

The thousand plus bots are each embedded with an Atmel microcontroller, two vibrating motors powering rigid legs that allow them to skitter across smooth surfaces, and an infrared emitter-sensor pair to receive commands and communicate wirelessly. They can transform into a variety of shapes, including a starfish and the letter K (as seen below).

What makes this piece of work so exceptional is that, before the Kilobot, most collectives were limited to less than 100 robots. In order to exceed previous limitations, this required completely rethinking how the robots were designed. To do this, the team of researchers created a coin-sized robot that possessed the ability to move on three stick-legs using two vibrating motors. It could then communicate with neighbouring robots using the aforementioned infrared light, signal its state by changing a color LED and sense ambient light.

In current robotics research, there has been a vast body of work on algorithms and control methods for groups of decentralized cooperating robots, called a swarm or collective. “These algorithms are generally meant to control collectives of hundreds or even thousands of robots; however, for reasons of cost, time, or complexity, they are generally validated in simulation only, or on a group of a few 10s of robots,” the study reveals. With the robots ready, the team developed an algorithm which could guarantee that a large numbers of robots, with limited capabilities and local communication, could cooperatively self-assemble into user-specified shapes. Four “seed” robots kick off the process, generating a domino-effect of signals that propagate through the rest of the swarm. How each Kilobot positions itself is dependent upon the distance between itself and its nearby bots. IEEE Spectrum explains that while in biological systems, swarms can organize and control themselves based on a set of very simple rules. With the Kilobots, however, the algorithm that they use to create shapes are based on a similarly simple set of capabilities:

• Edge-following, where a robot can move along the edge of a group by measuring distances from robots on the edge
• Gradient formation, where a source robot can generate a gradient value message that increments as it propagates through the swarm, giving each robot a geodesic distance from the source
• Localization, where the robots can form a local coordinate system using communication with, and measured distances to, neighbors

“Increasingly, we’re going to see large numbers of robots working together, whether its hundreds of robots co-operating to achieve environmental clean up or a quick disaster response, or millions of self-driving cars on our highways. Understanding how to design ‘good’ systems at that scale will be critical,” said Professor Radhika Nagpal.

For those interested in making, buying or programming their own Kilobot swarm, you can check out Harvard’s official project page 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.

 

Tech on Tour hits the road: Several months later

After tirelessly crisscrossing the globe for several years offering hands-on technical training, the Atmel team kicked off a new Tech on Tour era this past January with a tricked-out mobile trailer. Designed to literally drive the Internet of Things (and other next-gen technologies), 40’ x 85′ trailer brings hands-on training, hackathons, key technology demonstrations and other gatherings based around Atmel MCUs, MPUs, wireless, touch solutions and easy-to-use software tools. With more than 150 stops spanning across 30 states and 4 Canadian provinces, Tech on Tour is estimated to reach nearly 4,000 engineers this year alone.

Tens of thousands of miles later, the big rig has navigated the country — from Silicon Valley to the Hudson Valley, Atmel’s XSense Fab to the White House, Southern California to North Carolina, the deserts of Arizona to the plains of Kansas, the woods of Washington to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Thousands of engineers, execs and Makers alike have set foot onboard the trailer, including AVR Man, Sir Mix-A-Lot and even 13-year-old CEO Quin Etnyre. It has shared good times with our valued partners and lovable ol’ pals while turning heads and making new friends along the way. It has hosted a number of expert panel discussions, found itself parked in a middle of a tradeshow floor (link) and even had the chance to take in some of the landmarks in our nation’s capital. There have been sightings in the wild to selfies standing before the truck. And, after all of that, as we take a look back at the first six months of its inaugural tour, we must say that it’s been pretty truckin’ awesome!

“The IoT is being led by a rising generation of tinkerers, inventors and innovators. These are dedicated people who are working out of universities, garages and small companies. We are going and meeting them,” explained Sander Arts, Atmel VP of Marketing.

Already having made stops in both Minnesota, Illinois and Pennsylvania, the second leg of the tour is well underway. The Tech on Tour trailer will continue driving the Internet of Things (literally…) en route to:

Sept. 17: Melville, NY
Sept. 19: Waterbury, CT
Sept. 24: Westford, MA
Sept. 29: North Reading, MA
Oct. 2: Point Claire, QC
Oct. 7: Syracuse, NY
Oct. 15: Vaughan, ON

With upcoming stops in:

Cleveland, OH
Detroit, MI
Indianapolis,IN
Milwaukee, WI
Madison, WI

Next up, the teched-out truck will be making its way to Long Island with our friends from Avenet Electronics on September 17th to showcase a wide variety of tech, conducting training to include touch, mass storage class boot loading and Atmel’s SAM D21 Xplained Pro (ARM-based MCUs).

Interested in joining our ToTerrific team of tech experts for a day of SMART ARM-based Cortex M0+ training? Registration for this stop is now open!

Event Details

September 29, 2014
8:30 am – 5:00 pm

Avnet Electronics
400 Riverpark Drive
North Reading, MA 01864

Registration fee of $64.00 USD includes:

• Hands-on training with an Atmel Technology Expert
• Step-by-step training materials
• Atmel SAMD21 Xplained Pro Evaluation Kit
• Atmel QT1 Xplained Pro

Get your hands-on training and roll up your sleeves with first-hand instruction and building with Atmel’s latest ARM Cortex M0+ microcontroller and development board. This Atmel | SMART SAM D21 is intended for the next IoT, wearables, or industrial embedded system. With connectivity options including interface integration, the SAM D21 device also has various design tools and development boards to quickly jump start learning and design integration. Accelerating your product to MVP and fit the connectivity design parameters and ultra low power sipping parameters are key to today’s next emergent embedded systems.

A couple of days later, the mobile trailer will take a quick trip north to Pointe Claire, Quebec at Future Electronics. Registration for this stop is also now open!

Event Details

October 2, 2014
8:30 am – 5:00 pm

Future Electronics
237 Hymus Blvd
Pointe Claire, Quebec H9R 5C7

During this stop, attendees will learn more about:

• Hands-on training with an Atmel Technology Expert
• Step-by-step training materials
• Atmel SAMD21 Xplained Pro Evaluation Kit
• Atmel QT1 Xplained Pro

In a majority of upcoming stops, the one-day sessions will feature hands-on technical training based on the Atmel | SMART SAM D21, an evolution of the industry’s first microcontroller with robust, high-performance, easy-to-use capacitive touch support. The SAM D20/21 represent a paradigm shift for capacitive touch sensing in terms of noise tolerance, power consumption, touch quality, and application integration. This is enabled through the on-chip hardware Peripheral Touch Controller (PTC), complemented with this new generation of touch support in the Atmel Studio 6 development Ecosystem. While onboard the big rig, explore how to easily configure the noise filtering and sensitivity of your user interface, based on specific application based considerations, using the QTouch Analyzer, using live trace logging of capacitive sensing signals. Understand the significantly simplified process of building and integrating a touch based user interface alongside your application, leveraging the interrupt-driven, non-blocking QTouch library code (only 5% of CPU resources, while scanning 10 channels at 50ms scan rate).

Become familiar with this Atmel Software Framework (ASF) compatible design process, giving you the ability to mix and match capacitive buttons, sliders and wheels with standard MCU components of your application such as the differentiated USB, DMA and TCC peripherals on the SAM D21. SMART Microcontroller based products go to market with firmware programmed at the factory.

Whenever a bug is fixed or new feature is implemented, the firmware on the product needs to be updated. The process of updating the firmware becomes easy if the product has the capability of updating its firmware by itself. In this hands-on training we will develop a USB Host bootloader project for a SAM D21 device, that can detect a mass storage device (for example a USB thumb-/flash-drive) when connected to the USB-port. If this device contains an updated firmware image, the bootloader will then update the flash of the device with new firmware.

To find out when Atmel’s Tech on Tour training will be heading to a city near you, follow along with our up-to-date schedule here. Don’t forget to register and reserve your seat. Space is limited!

GOOOOOAL! Soccer robots score on humans at RoboCup

Now in its 18th year, the RoboCup is an annual robotics competition that pairs teams of bots against each other to compete in the game of soccer. As previously discussed in Bits & Pieces, the ultimate goal of the tournament is to develop a robotic humanoid soccer-playing robot by the year 2050. And from the looks of the GIF below, we may be closer than ever before.

In what may be perhaps the most exciting game each year, RoboCup features a robot-on-human matchup to give a sense of what the current state-of-the-art in robotic soccer truly is, and how it stacks up to a team of moderately-talented humans. Sure enough, every once in a while, the robots score a goal on the humans, just as they did this year in the GIF below.

IEEE Spectrum‘s Evan Ackerman gives the play-by-play on how the goal went down:

[T]his play was very far from dumb luck: Tech United Eindhoven’s robots made a pass, the striker robot looked at the goal and saw a defender in the way, decided not to shoot, made a pass instead, and the wing robot put it right into the side of the goal. Most of the humans weren’t particularly aggressive, but the defender dude looked like he was actually trying pretty hard there, and he couldn’t stop the attack.

Though this may not be the first time robots have gone on the scoreboard against humans in RoboCup, it is imperative to note that the goals are getting much more impressive because the robots are indeed getting better. So just how close are we before a team of microcontroller-powered creations can defeat a team comprised of flesh-and-blood Beckhams, Messis and Howards? As IEEE Spectrum sees it, these mid-size robots could be potentially defeating a determined team of humans on a small field within the next decade.

 

Report: Smart lighting market gets even brighter

A new report from analysis firm NanoMarkets details that the market surrounding smart lighting – LEDs, MCUs, and sensors – is set to surge in the near future. With the IoT ready to become a mainstream application, smart lighting technology cannot be far behind.

The report titled, “The Markets for Smart Lighting Drivers, Controllers and Sensor Chips – 2014,” includes an extensive 8-year outlook for the smart lighting industry and promises certain growth for all manufacturers and organizations involved. With lighting developers focusing on IoT opportunities, the analysts believe the surrounding industry will burgeon in the next decade with a growing demand for ‘mood’ lighting, wireless components and intelligent LED drivers.

According to NanoMarkets, the market for MCU-powered LED lighting sensors is projected to reach $525 million by the year 2019. Analysts also project that the customizable ‘mood’ lighting and wireless sensor markets will exceed $220 million in that same timeframe. The report concludes with a sweeping list of companies that could benefit from this market swell, including Atmel, Philips and Siemens.

The NanoMarkets report is not the only good news on the horizon for the smart lighting industry. Another report from research firm ON World provides data that supports the fact that 50% of Americans are interested in wireless LED lighting. The report also goes into detail noting that smart home adopters would be willing to pay slightly more for customizable and efficient lighting options.

Interested in exploring the market a bit further? You can view the entire NanoMarkets report here. For a complete breakdown of the ON World findings, that can be found here.

The evolution and DNA of the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT), as noted in previous Bits & Pieces articles, is really just a concept at this point because the “things” are undefined. As those “things” become more defined, the IoT’s things stop being just things and become something. So, the main question right now: What are those things going to be? Perhaps the IoT should more accurately be called the “IoXT” with “X” being the variable describing what that particular thing actually is. An example could be the Internet of wearable fitness trackers, factory robots, home automation, smart appliances, vehicle to vehicle communication, traffic control… well, you get the picture. The X can (and will) be many different things.

Clearly, for the IoT to be meaningful, the X must be identified in detail. The IoT must evolve from the ultra-general (i.e. “things”) to specific applications, components, systems, and integrated circuits, among others. There appears to be an emerging need for a classification hierarchy to describe the IoT as it differentiates and evolves. The Linnaeus classification model that is used in biology to describe living “things”, comes to mind. The same classification process can apply to silicon-based things and not just carbon-based things (beings).

Do you see the connection?

                           

In a silicon-based classification regime, the term “IoT” would probably lie somewhere between phylum and family. Though it is not entirely clear exactly where yet, that does really not matter at this point; however, what matters is that engineers and product managers must push product definition to the genus and species levels for the IoT to ever truly matter.

In the early stages of IoT’s evolution, there could easily be a type of Cambrian explosion with the genesis of an insane number of new devices covering a wide spectrum of applications that from the truly inspired to the ridiculous. Economic Darwinism would later surely take over to narrow down the numbers overtime with many going extinct and others continuing to adapt into world-changing “things.”

Because the IoT’s silicon building blocks (i.e. the DNA of IoT) are getting into place, it will become very easy to create, modify, and adapt countless smart, sensing, secure, communicating devices. That ease of design is what is making IoT’s potential staggering, and why so many companies (especially silicon companies) are aggressively pursuing the IoT market.

As for the numbers, Gartner believes 26 billion devices will have connectivity by 2022, while Ericsson and Cisco both forecast the number being even higher at 50 billion units by 2020 and 2022, respectively. McKinsey Global Institute (MGI)  expects IoT to have an economic impact of $2.7 to $6.2 trillion by 2025. Gartner notes that IoT suppliers will generate incremental product and service revenue exceeding $300 billion in 2020, resulting in over $1.9 trillion in global economic value-add in diverse end-markets. According to IDC, the installed base of IoT will be 212 billion by the end of 2020, with 30.1 billion of that being connected autonomous things.

The following chart from McKinsey Global Institute details their view of the impact from various economic categories. Note that healthcare is the largest, which makes perfect sense given the affinity of bio-sensors, continuous monitoring, wearable devices, and wireless communication. Subsequently, it is no accident that the major mobile platform and consumer product companies are pursuing bio-metric capabilities for wearable products.

With an increasing demand for medical care as populations age in Western countries, remote telemedicine to cover under-served populations makes great sense. Telemedicine could easily revolutionize medical care, and connected-sensing devices could revolutionize telemedicine. There is little to hold the growth of medical sensing and communicating networks back, especially since governmental agencies are on a mission to extend the provision of health care universally. Perhaps this is a perfect storm.

Health networks will be joined by networks of many types; each of those will be driven by the ability to create IoT devices from their four main building blocks:

1. Brains (MCU)
2. Wireless Communications
3. Sensors of Various Types
4. Security.

Devices with those fundamental IoT building blocks will differentiate on each of those four axes depending upon what they need to do. Some of the types of networks that could show up and drive the IoT’s evolution are noted below:

• M2M:  Machine to Machine network
• V2V: Vehicle to Vehicle network
• Personal medical network
• PAN: Personal area network (wearable network)
• Home entertainment network
• Personal social network.
• Home automation/security network
• Personal fitness network.
• Car infotainment network
• Highway sensor network
• Hazardous material sensing network
• Smart appliance network
• Augmented reality network
• Multi-screen network
• Energy management network

There are of course others, too.

One last thing: The dirty little secret of the IoT is that there probably cannot be such a thing as the Internet of Things if those things are not secure. That is where devices like Atmel CryptoAuthentication ICs play an important, if not catalytic role. Making sure that the nodes in the various networks are authentic and that the data being transmitted have not been tampered with is what CryptoAuthentication devices do. It is easy to see why security is important when there are billions of things keeping track of you, right?

So, authentication may in actual fact be the sine qua non (“without which there is nothing”) of the IoT.

Or, to put it another way: No security? No IoT for you.

 

Report: Wearables need makeover to maximize market

According to a new Beecham Research report, the wearable tech market stands for a greater chance of mass consumer adoption if it can somehow up its chicness. The report notes that wearable devices will swiftly move beyond just smart glasses and watches to embrace products in a wider variety of sectors, such as safety, security, glamor and healthcare.

The fashion-forward wearable tech market could hit $9.3 billion by 2018, which would nearly triple the current market prediction. As validation of the uptick, ABI Research recently also predicted that the annual average demand for wearable devices will skyrocket by 22% during the period of 2013-2018, rising from less than 200 million units to 500 million.

“Current market forecasts are based on smartphone-centric view of wearable technology,” explained Saverio Romeo, Principal Analyst at Beecham. “We see wearable tech as playing a critical role in the drive to greater connectivity and the Internet of Things.”

As previously reported in Bits & Pieces, smart wearable band shipments increased dramatically in the second half of 2013, with analysts at Canalys predicting a significant acceleration of the trend to continue this year. Over 17 million wearable bands are forecasted to ship this year alone, driven primarily by devices with wearable-specific sensors. More specifically, Canalys estimates this number will grow to over 23 million units by 2015 and over 45 million by 2017. In 2018, that number could swell to almost 112 million.

“There is a very strong focus on technology around wearable devices [which is] a problem as they should be user-centric,” Romeo added during the launch of the firm’s latest report.

According to Beecham analyst Claire Duke-Woolley, one of the areas that needs to do more to embrace wearable technology is in the fashion market. “If this market really is to take a different route, we should look at partnerships that we have never seen before, between technology companies and fashion,” she urges.

While several companies currently offering smart watches prefer a more tech-centric approach, Beecham Research points to the new Withings Activité that merges Parisian design with Swiss watch making to create desirable, stylish and functional products. It also highlights the newly-unveiled Fitbit and Tory Birch collaboration as an example of how the fitness market is moving beyond the functionality of traditional products. Another sector where Beecham Research sees progress is in smart clothing and textiles, from the likes of Cute Circuit and Wearable Experiments, along with Studio XO, which exemplifies the right ethos and multidisciplinary approach, but is still to move beyond the couture end of the market.

Ranging from SAM4S to tinyAVR MCUs, Atmel finds itself smack in the middle of the rapidly-evolving wearable tech revolution. In addition, Atmel devices integrate numerous features to save circuit board space, such as USB transceivers and embedded termination resistors. Many devices are offered in very small form factor packages, a critical characteristic for engineers and Makers designing wearable tech and elaborated upon further in this wearable computing white paper.

Want to read more? Download the entire Beecham Research report entitled “Wearable Technology — the Fashion Tech Era: Towards a Multidisciplinary Approach.”