IoT design: It takes a village

By Gina Roos, editor-in-chief

2019 will be the year of big trends — 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous vehicles (and other autonomous devices), virtual reality, and the internet of things (IoT) — that have a significant impact on the electronic components industry. Each sector will advance across application spaces thanks to the critical role that electronic components play in enabling these technologies.

In January, we start with the IoT, focusing on the value chain from board-level components to development kits. IoT is already completely entrenched in our society across end-market segments, but there are still enormous challenges around the design, development, and deployment of devices and services for the IoT, with security at the top of the list in 2019.

Starting from a kernel of an idea for a specific use case, it requires engineers and designers to have expertise across a range of technologies from sensors and microprocessors to RF/wireless design and connectivity, security, and even cloud services. In most cases, it’s not possible to have all of the required expertise in-house.

Take, for example, an industrial IoT use case to improve automation and reduce costs. It requires an understanding of sensors, robotics, remote connectivity, wireless communications, and cloud-based services. Add the fact that many of these industrial applications use solutions that could be more than 20 or 30 years old, and now design complexity gets that much more difficult. So how do you bring new technology to an existing install base? Our Outlook story details what you need to understand to address the problem and how to verify the design of industrial IoT sensor nodes.

A new breed of development kits
The IoT supply chain has been moving toward more collaboration to provide development and design kits designed for specific use cases and industries. A new breed of development kits is incorporating the three tenets of IoT design — ease of use, security, and business value — so that design engineers don’t need to have specialized expertise in several areas like networking protocols or security-related tasks, enabling a much faster development time. A few examples of dev kits show that it’s all about simplifying the design work by intelligently reusing the fundamental building blocks.

Clearly, sensors are a big part of any connected device, and there is a lot of innovation occurring in this market that delivers new features — think AI — all housed in smaller packaging.

“AI will be applied to a wide range of IoT information, including video, still images, speech, network traffic activity, and sensor data,” said Nick Jones, Gartner’s research vice president, in a recent report. Gartner expects that there will be 14.2 billion connected “things” in 2019, climbing to 25 billion by 2021.

Wearables are a good example of an area in which sensor and MEMS technology innovation is happening fast, wherein new types of sensors are needed to bring new functionality to wearable devices. For example, in next-generation personal health-monitoring devices, they will likely monitor for a host of health issues including heart-rate variability, oxygen levels, cardiac health, blood pressure, hemoglobin, glucose, and body temperature. This will require new sensing technologies like MEMS sensors with algorithms and firmware that intelligently process, synthesize, and calibrate the output of sensors.

More and more processor manufacturers are building their next-generation chips specifically for AI applications that can be quite complex. These are built to meet the computing power requirements needed for AI algorithms and running applications. On top of this, there are a lot of cloud providers teaming up with processor makers to tie hardware into their cloud offerings, and all of them are adding robust built-in security and some form of higher integration.

A growing number of embedded systems are open to security threats as a result of increasing connectivity and IoT device adoption, said VDC Research in a recent report. And it’s costing OEMs a lot in terms of money and reputation.

A 2018 VDC IoT and Embedded Engineer survey found that “a significant portion of OEMs’ existing in-house labor cost is already dedicated to addressing security” and is rising faster than development costs. VDC pegs the worldwide embedded engineering labor spend related to security at $11.6 billion in 2017, representing nearly 8% of the overall cost of embedded engineering labor.

A 2018 Gartner Inc. survey found that nearly 20% of organizations surveyed experienced at least one IoT-based attack in the past three years. The market research firm expects that global spending on IoT security will rise to $3.1 billion in 2021, up from $1.5 billion in 2018.

Don’t forget to check out the winners of Electronic Products’ 43rd Annual Product of the Year Awards . Component manufacturers are recognized for their outstanding products that represent any of the following qualities: a significant advancement in a technology or its application, an exceptionally innovative design, a substantial achievement in price/performance, improvements in design performance, and a potential for new product designs/opportunities.