By Majeed Ahmad, Contributing Editor
The boom-and-bust cycles are all too familiar in the technology business. But while market busts are noisy and chaotic, booms are often subtle. Take, for instance, the recent uptake in the chips business that The Wall Street Journal calls an unprecedented semiconductor boom.
The worst is over, says Gartner in its 2017 market outlook, while pointing to an increase in the ASPs for select chip markets. Gartner also tracks the semiconductor industry turnaround to the second quarter of 2016.
Analysts mostly credit this uptake to greater demand for DRAM and NAND flash chips, and they are advising caution amid the fickle nature of the memory chips business. Moreover, analysts point to the fact that leading memory chipmakers like Samsung are adding capacity, and that could lead to a memory chips glut.
However, as The Wall Street Journal points out, a closer look reveals that a new breed of connected devices and big data being handled by datacenters and cloud servers are the underlying agents of change.
Take connected products, for example, which make up the larger IoT realm. Gartner projects that these connected things — ranging from baby monitors to glucose meters to thermostats — are going to increase from 3.8 billion in 2014 to 8.4 billion in 2017 and 20.4 billion in 2020.
Engineering challenges ahead
But while the chip sales keep climbing, there are enormous engineering challenges in the markets like IoT that have got engineers so excited. For a start, IoT developers are striving to build secure systems that are resistant to cyberattacks.
Likewise, the automotive industry is confronting insecurities while making cars more connected and smarter through technology building blocks like ADAS, radars, and lidars. Automotive, along with next-generation consumer electronics, is also at the forefront of new technology endeavors such as machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Then there are datacenters and cloud servers, which are dealing with constantly rising demand for bandwidth amid the growing internet traffic. So as more “things” go online, engineers have to rework network architectures to create more capacity and make networks safer and more resilient at multiple entry points.
Here, it’s worth mentioning that cloud has become an intrinsic part of the IoT systems. That’s why chipmakers like Cypress, STMicro, and Silicon Labs are offering demo boards and developer kits for simplifying cloud connectivity for IoT designers.
And that brings forth another critical challenge for IoT developers: integration. From sensing to nodes to cloud computing, the nature of engineering challenges keeps on changing, and so do the skillset requirements.
The IoT bandwagon is most likely the harbinger of a golden age of semiconductors, like the one that the industry witnessed in the PC era during the 1980s and 1990s, and after mobile handsets and smartphones splashed in the 2000s and 2010s.
Another design boom is knocking at the industry doorsteps. Are you ready?
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