Will silicon chiplets bring a new wave of IoT connectivity and personalization to consumers?

Welcome to the brave new world of silicon chiplets. I’ve been super excited about the emerging architectures my colleagues have been telling me about. It feels like this could herald a real disruption for the consumer sector – enabling the next wave of affordable, faster-to-market device and digital services development. We’ve heard about the ‘smart dust’ future of true IoT proliferation for years. Is it starting to come true?  

Well, yes and no. At Cambridge Consultants, I’m fortunate to be surrounded – on Zoom and Teams at least – by semiconductor specialists as well as systems architects, sensor physicists and other consumer market specialists like myself. So together we can bring together what is technically feasible with what makes global consumer brands tick. My catch-ups with colleagues have led me to a measured view that embraces the challenges as well as the significant value and growth opportunities. 

The current focus on ultra-low power, low cost silicon innovation brings rich potential for many consumer market sectors and beyond. As our chiplets whitepaper explains, a modular approach that changes the architecture of a semiconductor chip, by separating the analog from the digital elements, can drive costs way down.

A semiconductor company will have a much more diverse set of markets to grow its business and a consumer brand should see the commercial potential. The opportunity to bring intelligence and connectivity to a physical product that would previously have been 'dumb’ suddenly starts seeming real. A talking cereal box anyone? 

The tipping point for disruption 

So which market sectors are in the right place to make the most of this chiplet approach? Which sectors are at the tipping point where this disruption in silicon cost and development time will make connectivity possible? Let’s look back to previous disruptions… over a decade ago many sports and fitness brands could fairly be considered apparel companies. Sure, they made sporting equipment, but they made A LOT of sneakers and t-shirts.   

Then they began to explore the possibility of wearables and how they could help their consumers achieve their fitness goals through technology and digital services. This had become possible because the component costs had reduced significantly and also because consumers now had a crucial part of the system, their smartphone, already in their pocket. 

We were very much part of helping the sporting brands explore and make this transition, working with Nike and Speedo amongst others. Scroll forward to today… which market sectors would benefit from ‘getting digital’ and could be tipped over the edge by the step change in cost that the chiplets architecture brings? 

I work with many different consumer market areas, and the benefits of moving to digital have been a hot topic for many years. The ability to connect more with consumers, to enhance the brand position, to explore new revenue models… there are no shortages of ideas, but they are thwarted by the component cost and the development time/cost to design custom silicon. Does the idea of chiplets show a way through this? 

I believe the beauty and personal care space is on the edge of major disruption and rich in opportunity. Gwyneth has her ‘Goop’ and the beauty industry has its ‘gloop’ – the creams, lotions and formulations that have been the be-all and end-all for decades.

But now the brands are stretching into new areas. Consumers are demanding more personalized products that are just right for their individual needs. They have the expectation that they should be able to quantify and measure everything about themselves. They want to know that the money they’re spending on products is ‘worth it’, and they want to be able to achieve a salon look in their home. P&G’s Opté system is a good example. 

Brands want to connect with consumers beyond the point of purchase, and to help them achieve their desired results while building new revenue streams. L'Oréal’s Perso system is case in point. Brands also want better, more quantified, consumer insights to help them to develop new products better and faster – and to gather evidence for claims.  

Meeting the personalization demand 

Driven by unrelenting global consumer demand, personalization is being brought to the forefront of beauty and personal care innovation. Modular silicon becoming viable for even more use cases will only speed the trend for brands to transition from selling products to selling holistic experiences that connect to the consumer.  

Sensing aspects of the consumer and translating that into actionable insights is possible with today’s technology but new approaches are reducing the cost and timescales for development, making this far more feasible. Unlike monolithic approaches, chiplets disaggregate functions into modular building blocks that can be manufactured at very low cost. Crucially, they also cut development costs and timescales – radically reducing time to market. And in the ultra-competitive consumer sector, that’s gold dust. 

Are trials the stepping-stone towards a connected future? 

Moving into a digital and connected world requires more than just new technology. It will take brands a while to adapt, to build out new skillsets, and to build new supply chains. One way ‘gloop’ companies can learn to embrace the new technology – while also bringing huge value – is through using digital connectivity to aid consumer trials.   

We’ve done lots of work in the trials area, including the development of our Experiential Sensing concept. It uses tech to help big brands validate research hypotheses and observations – as well as adding an entirely new set of data to provide unprecedented consumer understanding. 

It contrasts to the traditional way consumer trials around the world are still conducted in the main… focus group discussions behind one-way mirrors, products to take home and test, surveys to be completed and returned. It’s an area ready for disruption to bring faster and more quantified insights to brands, while also helping brands to learn more about the technology that could be in real products in the future.  

In a home setting, super-low cost, ultra-low power sensors that hardly need charging – and are so unobtrusive they’re almost forgotten about – could remain in place for the whole of the trial. Take a face cream. With a connected sensor system, you could learn when they used it, where they put it on their face, what the temperature and humidity in the room was, whether their daily routine affected their usage of the cream… you get the picture. On the face of it, trials represent a smaller opportunity than consumer mass market activity, but the heightened customer insight is priceless. 

There are many other market sectors beyond beauty that could benefit from the digital opportunities of the new chip architectures. Food and beverage companies, for example, could think about the opportunities to combine consumable-durable systems with connectivity to enable the consumer to get exactly the right result, to aid authentication and to help with traceability for supply chain tracking.  

Challenges will remain of course, not all of them technical. The promise of limitless connectivity and the trillions of devices accompanying it will only add to the global debate around recycling and sustainability.  Adding electronics and connectivity brings the need to build new supply chains, to think about product support and service design and build. There's plenty more talking and planning to be done.

In the meantime, why not check out that whitepaper, Chiplets: the path to IoT diversity and do please drop me a line to chat through the subject in more detail.