The rise of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the exponential growth in quantity and scale of data and sensor inputs redefines storage and processing criticality. Optimal task prioritization is morphing from linear-stacked to dynamic-flat. For edge and embedded systems where architecture and power are limited, traditional mixed-criticality systems (and storage) introduce a new dimension: accuracy. This dimension provides the greatest value in systems where the availability of data and sensor inputs exceeds the hardware’s capability to compute all potentially beneficial elements, and a processing-level imprecise calculation enables inputs to, in turn, inform accuracy needs. The key to achieving this at the hardware layer can be found in analog computing. For AI/ML systems, imprecise and analog processing approaches hold the potential to dramatically increase overall accuracy for a growing range of applications. An added benefit of analog computing is its resiliency to a variety of external interference – especially critical for lightweight space applications.
Category Archives: Communications
PCBs to FHEs – Flexible Electronics to Become Ubiquitous
The advancements enabled by the silicon revolution are reaching a new pivot point which finally breaks the discrete adjacency of the physical world and the digital world which fueled the productivity growth of the last several decades.
Sculpting everything from finance and trade to communications, and dramatically upsetting the human story of generations prior, the digital revolution to date has done so, largely through external interaction. The first computers were created to process inputs and deliver solutions for labor intensive calculations such as trajectories for missiles, encoding communications, or tabulating and drawing conclusions from large data sets such as the U.S. census. The integrated circuit, using a miniaturized lithographic process based upon technology developed nearly 200 years prior, has delivered this digital computing in a vastly-scalable format which now serves as a critical underlying infrastructure for nearly everything we do today. Gordon Moore’s observations promised exponential advancement, storage technologies reacted, data points from sensors and other input data sources became relevant in retrospect and even real-time, and data science was born.
Consider electronic ink surfaces and Bluetooth interfaces used in reusable luggage tags made by Rimowa, and being trialed by Lufthansa and Alaska Airlines; RFID tags used for inventory, tracking and access control, or chip-embedded EMV credit cards which have now replaced the majority of credit cards in your wallet.
Data no longer moves from static databases through processors to report a solution. Now, something happens in the real-time world and an immediate technology-provided response is becoming both ubiquitous and expected. Printing technologies are again being leveraged to replace the flat, minimally flexible glass-reinforced epoxy-based printed circuit boards used in the majority of electronic assemblies to create new flexible circuits on nearly any form or type of surface. Coined ‘flexible hybrid electronics’ (FHE), these flexible hybrid manufacturing techniques most often rely on thin silicon wafer based chips embedded onto flexible materials which may be applied to surfaces or embedded within objects. Implanted energy harvesting technologies and similarly flexible batteries enable sensor networks to independently react or transmit data passively with intelligent real-time responsiveness. Form factors range from temporary skin-adhered circuitry barely visible to the naked eye, to surface applications on critical components in transportation infrastructure such as airplane wings or bridges. Revenue from flexible electronics in 2016 is estimated at $8.6 billion, and is predicted by the market research firm IDTechEx to triple to $26.2 billion by 2020.
Industry groups including NextFlex and the DoD-backed FlexTech Alliance, serve as innovation hubs for advancement and implementation; both are based in San Jose, CA.