New-Tech Magazine Europe | Dec 2015 Digital edition

hill Christie from imec IC-link talked to three experts from P The New Hardware Hipsters INNOVATE WITH HARDWARE IN TODAY’S SUBSTREAM MARKETS Ramses Valvekens, Bart Keppens, Phill Christie, Jeroen Van Ham deliver faster, more flexible, and with lower upfront investments.

But today’s new generation of hardware hipsters are pushing the boundaries of what you can do with hardware; with systems that perceive their surroundings and start thinking about their environment with their cloud-based brains. Commenting on this, Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, said that “hardware is the new software” and that hardware start-ups are looking a lot like the software start-ups of the previous digital age. They are aggressively targeting innovative new Internet Of Things (IoT) markets, such as life sciences and medical diagnosis, automotive, security, vision and imaging, and industrial applications. These are rapidly growing, much more segmented and with a need for specialized lower-volume ASICs. So here the economies of scale which favor larger companies do not play. Progress, change and innovation under these conditions does not

imec IC-link’s IP & Design Partnership Program: Ramses Valvekens from system-on-chip design company Easics, Jeroen Van Ham from analog and mixed-signal design company ICsense, and Bart Keppens from Sofics, a provider of intellectual property (IP) for electrostatic discharge protection. Together, they take a snapshot of what is needed to innovate with hardware in today’s substream markets. Until recently, building hardware was not cool. With lengthy development cycles and a huge upfront investment for custom ICs, innovators have long turned to software to develop new products. But today a new generation of hardware hipsters has arrived. They build today’s smart systems that interact intelligently with their environment. Systems for small innovative markets, which they can

Is hardware cool again? Foratleastthelasttwodecades,custom integrated circuits were implemented in leading edge technologies with development cycles longer than the shelf-lives of the products. It was punishingly expensive if you made a design mistake, and the upfront investments needed for leading edge silicon technology were eye- watering. Developing these custom ICs was therefore almost exclusively the playing field of large multinational semiconductor companies with deep pockets. Innovation in the global markets of consumer, computing, telecom and mobile was necessarily characterized by generation after generation of incrementally better products, based on IP-portfolios that took large teams several years to develop.

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