Internet of Things At A Strategic Inflection Point

IoT Technology And Market Requirements Convergence

Current Long-Term Market Projections Are Based On The Emergence Of Technology Solutions

This Mayo615 YouTube Channel video focuses on a particularly important technology market, the Internet of Things. IoT is at a strategic inflection point, due to explosive projected market growth and unresolved problems of wireless data throughput and energy-efficiency needs. The IoT market is projected to grow to 75 Billion devices by 2025. This growth is predicated on very high throughput wireless networks combined with high energy-efficiency which are not yet available.  Existing wireless technologies, including 5G, will not meet this market need. Also, the extreme diversity of IoT applications will require both small sensors that operate using minimal energy and bandwidth and virtual reality applications with very high Gigabit per second data rates and substantial power requirements. For example, Intel estimates that one autonomous vehicle will generate 4 Terabytes of data daily.

The good news is that through my work evaluating advanced research proposals in IoT, I can report that a solution may already be at the laboratory “proof of concept” stage.

The proposed solution that is emerging is the development of innovative software-hardware architectures in which all network layers are jointly designed, combining a millimeter wave high-throughput wireless network and a battery-free wireless network into a single integrated wireless solution.

This is no small feat of engineering but it does appear to be feasible. There are many challenges to successfully demonstrating a millimeter wave wireless network integrated with the Tesla-like concept of radio-wave backscatter energy harvesting. However, collaboration among universities and large Internet companies’ research units are nearing the demonstration of such a network. The likely horizon for this becoming an industry standard is probably three to five years, with prototype products appearing sooner.

You can also read my earlier website posts on the Internet of Things here on mayo615.com.  Links to related posts on IoT are also shown below on this post.

Moore’s Law at 50: At Least A Decade More To Go And Why That’s Important

Gordon Moore, now 86, is still spry and still given to the dry sense of humor for which he has always been known.  In an Intel interview this year he said that he had Googled “Moore’s Law” and “Murphy’s Law,” and Moore’s beat Murphy’s by two to one,” demonstrating how ubiquitous is the usage of Dr. Moore’s observation. This week we are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the April 19, 1965 issue of Electronics magazine, in which Dr. Moore first described his vision of doubling the number of transistors on a chip every year or so.

It may seem geeky to be interested in the details of 14 nanometer (billionth of a meter) integrated circuit design rules, 7 nanometer FinFET (transistor) widths, or 5 nanometer line wire widths, but the fact of matter is that these arcane topics are driving the future of technology applications, telecommunications, business and economic productivity.  As just one example, this week’s top telecommunications business news is the proposed merger of Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent, with the vision to deploy a 5 G (fifth generation) LTE (long term evolution) mobile telephony network. Building out such a high speed voice and data network is almost entirely dependent on the power of the microprocessors in the system and ultimately Moore’s Law.  Nokia apparently believes that it can deploy this technology sooner rather than later and essentially leap frog the competition.  My UBC Management students will recall that in my first university teaching experience in Industry Analysis, I chose to expose them to the semiconductor industry for this exact reason.  Semiconductors are in virtually every electrical device we use on a daily basis.

However, as we cross this milestone we are able to see that we are near the limits of the physics of Moore’s Law.  International Business Strategies, a Los Gatos based consulting firm, estimates that only a decade ago, it cost only $16 million to design and test a new very large scale integated circuit (VLSI), but that today the design and testing cost has skyrocketed to $132 million.  Keep in mind that the cost of design, fabrication and testing of bleeding edge IC’s has been reduced dramatically over the decades by automation, also driven by Moore’s Law. So we are seeing a horizon line.  That said, entirely new technologies are already in the laboratories and may, in a way,  extend Moore’s Law, and the dramatic improvements in cost and productivity that come with it, but through entirely new and different means.