Integration Holds the Key to the Future of the IoT

Today in Nürnberg, I gave the opening keynote address at Embedded World. The most important point from the speech is that the IoT is at an inflection point and will see explosive growth in the coming years. This growth is contingent on us, as a community of silicon and software engineers, making strides in the areas of energy efficiency, interoperability and integration.

There’s a nice set of analogies that can describe the future of the IoT evolution: the near-ubiquitous smartphone is a platform that invites direct comparison to the IoT. For example, when considering energy efficiency, many IoT devices will need to operate for 5 years on a single coin cell battery, which is equivalent to 10% of a fully charged smartphone, 220 mAh. This battery constraint requires ultra-low power microcontrollers and wireless solutions. These wireless solutions necessitate protocols specifically designed for low power and low data rates, such as mesh networks (ZigBee and Thread), Bluetooth Smart and low power Wi-Fi (as it becomes available).

Many of the same components that enable our smartphones to connect, sense and process will exist in the IoT. A cell phone has multiple radio protocols (in one day, you’ll connect to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and LTE), a processor, a sensor node to collect all sorts of data, energy management functionality to regulate battery life, short term and long term memory, and mixed signal control that allows the user to use touch or voice to activate the phone. None of this is exactly revolutionary—we keep adding more and more sensor types, making the components smaller and smaller, and improving battery life. There can be up to a dozen integrated circuits inside a cellphone. The key to the IoT, however, is doing all of this in a smaller package, ideally in a single chip. The integrated result is the IoT SoC.

Here’s that picture, in close-up:

As you can see, this looks familiar. At a macro level, this would be the chip that lies at the heart of IoT devices like programmable thermostats and wearable fitness bands. Let’s break open the boxes:

1. Multi-protocol radio refers to the device’s ability to communicate over a variety of different wireless radio protocols. Being able to support more than one protocol at the same time is key to continuing to support the install base of connected devices over time, i.e. support ZigBee and Thread from the same SoC.
2. The ARM? Cortex? MCU is the microcontroller that provides the information processing capability for the device.
3. Sensor I/F is the sensor node where a multitude of environmental and physical data can be collected: temperature and relative humidity, heart rate, pulse oximetry, gyro, touch or capacitive sensing—more and more data types are added constantly.
4. Energy management is all about keeping energy consumption manageable so that battery life is within acceptable parameters.
5. Memory includes increasingly larger amounts of both short term memory (like RAM) and longer term, stored flash memory on the same die.
6. Finally, the mixed signal components allow the SoC to convert digital computations into analog signals that control an actuator like a motor to open or close a valve, for example.

These SoCs lie at the heart of the IoT device explosion and need to be built on more scalable platform to serve a much broader market than the smartphone. There are a vast array of applications, from light bulbs to wearables, from thermostats to window sensors—and they all have to integrate and communicate.

The IoT is not just a static set of functionality; it will evolve, just like cellphones. Where will IoT devices be in a year? Five years? Twenty? I can speculate about how the components will become smaller, more energy efficient. Perhaps they’ll someday be able to harvest all the energy they need to function from their environments and not batteries. Maybe integration between our homes and our lives will become so inseparable that we never feel disconnected from our environment or powerless to change it to suit our preferences.

The future of the IoT is limitless, exciting and incredibly dynamic. Let’s all see where this ride takes us.