New-Tech Europe | March 2016 | Digital edition

Internet of Things: How Will They Be Built?

Paul McLellan, Cadence

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for recreational use (I don't think we count a Predator as being an IoT device) One of the drivers of IoT is video. As video has gotten cheap enough to add to everything, it is becoming ubiquitous, not just in obvious places like GoPro cameras, but for security and to give drones inspection capability. The key interfaces are likely to be MIPI for sensor interfaces, especially the new I3C standard. This not only supersedes the I2C standard but is public domain, unlike I2C which was owned by Philips Semiconductors, now NXP (and the new standard is pronounced eye-three-see whereas the old one was pronounced eye- squared-see). The other really important interface is CSI, the Camera Standard Interface, actually MIPI's CSI-2 and

need to have power consumption low enough to last the lifetime of the product (perhaps the time from planting to harvest of the crop). Plus you've probably heard about power scavenging devices. In Mike Muller's keynote at ARM Techcon he talked about a blood glucose monitor that was powered by removing the cap, generating 400 uJ of energy, enough to perform the measurement. Other experimental devices are powered by ambient heat. It remains to be seen which IoT devices really take off in interesting volumes. Today we have: • Fitness monitors like FitBit • Watches like Pebble and the Apple Watch • Thermostats like Nest • Cameras like GoPro • Radio-controlled drones, mostly

nternet of Things (IoT) is not really a market, it

is a catchall term for devices that connect to the internet, sometimes via our smartphones. The whole IoT ecosystem has a cloud backend and networking to get the data there and back, but I don't consider that part of the IoT market, that is part of infrastructure. And smartphones are part of mobile. A typical IoT device contains some sort of computing element, some sort of networking, and one or more sensors. It is battery powered and those batteries have to last a long time. For example, at DesignCon I attended a teardown of a fitness monitor that can last six months on a single coin cell. Other applications, such as sensors out in fields for agricultural applications, might

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