A Look Back at Key Technology Trends that Defined 2013

The electronics industry reliably moved forward in 2013, with growth as high as 10 percent expected over 2012. We saw some continuing trends such as the expansion of ARM cores, as well as some unexpected innovations along with some new concepts that are now part of our collective vocabulary.  

The proliferation of ARM processor cores across the globe is remarkable. At the low end, nearly every microcontroller (MCU) vendor is adding a new ARM® Cortex^TM- M0+ or the higher-end ARM Cortex-M4 to its lineup, effectively crowding out proprietary MCU architectures and boot-strapping what might previously have been 8- and 16-bit applications to the 32-bit level.   Freescale®, which only recently embraced ARM fully in its MCU product line, currently boasts over 500 varieties; although with packaging, memory, and temperature options on baseline configurations, such totals can spin up quickly.

Coincidentally, Intel® has been stealing noisily into ARM's back yard.  To better address battery-powered systems, Intel re-architected the x86 family years ago into a more power-aware, lower-performance configuration called Atom^TM .  Clearly, wireless devices such as smart phones, tablets, and wearables (e.g., smart watches) are significant new platforms that can be a key component of disparate consumer, commercial, and medical systems. Intel is making sure the Intel Architecture is a player in these high-volume markets with Atom and the new, smaller-yet Quark processors and SoCs. 

Open source hardware continued to build momentum in 2013. Arduino and Raspberry Pi were joined by the Beaglebone Black (BBB) in April.  The BBB offers a Texas Instruments 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor along with 65 GPIO and video interfaces, effectively bridging the gap between media and control applications.  A new player emerged at the end of the year as Intel released the Galileo platform:  An Arduino-compatible board based on their new Pentium-class Quark processor. 

Terms like “Internet of Things” and “Industry 4.0” burst into the mainstream vocabulary this year, encouraging the use of the word “smart”. Smart, of course, is a relative term. Generally, smart in electronics has come to mean  that the device is able to do a lot on its own without human intervention.  However, lately the industry uses “smart” to refer to highly-connected intelligent systems that make use of all available information, some local, some gathered from nearby systems, and maybe from far away. Essentially anything attached to the Internet would be deemed smart by this definition. 

The continuing growth of the LED lighting market in 2013 – already a $4.8 billion industry in 2012 – is expected to grow 45 percent per year through 2019.  LED manufacturers such as Cree and Philips Lumileds are consistently releasing new families of products such as the XLAMP® XQ-D family and the LUXEON® TX series, respectively, that are pushing the performance envelope in terms of efficacy, reliability, and  design flexibility.  Incandescent bulbs are definitely on the endangered species list, eventually to be kept around only as “vintage” decorator items. 

The year 2013 was not revolutionary, but as an evolutionary year it was quite successful. Consumer electronics continued to drive the industry, which responded with ever faster processors and some highly innovative designs. By and large, electronic component manufacturers did an excellent job in a challenging environment, for which they were appropriately rewarded. If everyone stays on their toes, 2014 should be an equally interesting and rewarding year.