IIC Journal of Innovation 10th Edition | Page 37

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 - 33 - March 2019