Keeping Ahead of the Curve with Custom ASICs
end to your IoT adoption? Is it really
necessary to achieve your business goals?
I NTRODUCTION
While disruption is sometimes seen as being
negative and bringing fear of the unknown,
early adopters do in fact reap the benefits.
These include the ability to be more
proactive rather than reactive, having better
control over inventory and facility
management, being able to optimize
logistics and having improved safety. To
achieve these benefits however, cost, size,
performance and other optimizations must
be more flexible and responsive to end
customer need. Doing the same thing the
same way will no longer cut it. With the IIoT,
demands are greater and more and more it
becomes
apparent
that
standard
commercial off-the-shelf chips are not
always the answer to developing each
system as each provider has unique
requirements. Awareness is growing that
custom silicon is a compelling solution to
reap the benefits from the disruptive forces
of IIoT.
Disruption in electronics has always been
considered as an output from the consumer
market. However, for a change, a recent
candidate for disruptive technology is very
much the Internet of Things (IoT) in
industrial markets. Since the German
strategic initiative of Industry 4.0 was
announced to the public at the Hannover
Messe Industrie fair in 2011, the Industrial
IoT (IIoT) has spread around the world and is
disrupting industry in all territories. With the
IoT, communication can seamlessly occur
between cyber physical systems and humans
in real-time and via the Internet of Services 1 ,
making possible the vision of smart factories,
where a virtual copy of the physical world
can be created, and decisions decentralized.
When the concept of IoT was first proposed,
it was envisaged that all the data measured
could be transmitted to the cloud, stored
there and then the data retrieved whenever
it was needed. With the daily numbers of
over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data 2 being
created and growing year by year, the
concept of a purely cloud-based computing
being the only solution is raising questions.
Is moving all data to the cloud always a good
idea? Indeed, is it always necessary? Can it
be a bad idea? What happens if there is
latency in communications? What is the cost
associated with transmitting, gathering and
storing of all this data? Does this mean an
1
Custom chips or Application Specific
Integrated Circuits (ASICs) are every device
maker’s dream, offering a single piece of
silicon packaged in a single chip that is highly
integrated, optimized and efficient,
designed specifically for your product
requirements. But over the years, ASICs have
had bad press. They were seen by many as
expensive and a luxury only of companies
that were shipping millions of units a year
and likely focused on the consumer markets.
https://conceptsystemsinc.com/the-internet-of-services-in-industrie-4-0/
22
Forbes. How Much Data Do We Create Every Day? The Mind-Blowing Stats Everyone Should Read https://bit.ly/2TTLHNZ
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March 2019