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published by Morry Marshall on Wed, 2018-10-31 00:05
Many IoT (Internet of Things) applications will be untethered, not connected by physical wires for power or communications. They will use batteries, and battery life will be critical. Atmosic Technologies, a Bay Area startup of ultra-low power wireless for the IoT, has developed a chip ideally suited for these applications.
This week, Atmosic Technologies launched the M2 and M3 series, touting it as the industry’s lowest-power wireless Bluetooth 5.0 chips. It offers improved battery life in three ways. First, the chip was designed from the ground up to be a low-power chip. It has intrinsic design features that offer five to 10 times more battery life than other Bluetooth 5.0 chips. Second, it has on-demand receiving. The chip can be in a sleep mode until it receives a Bluetooth signal including specific codes to wake it up. That feature can improve battery life by up to 100 times. Third, it includes an RF Power Harvesting Section. By harvesting RF energy, the chip offers what can be essentially infinite battery life. The chip can use any of these three methods of battery life improvement on its own or in any combination.
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Forward Visibility for Semiconductor Pricing and Availability
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Artificial intelligence in the IoT category-especially automotive, industrial and home automation-has helped boost semiconductor unit sales. Growth in these sectors, as well as in agriculture and smart cities, is expected to further expand semiconductor demand. A new research report from Semico Research, Semico Wafer Demand Update Q3 2018 (MA112-18), forecasts that Automotive MOS Logic units are on track to grow 35% in 2018.
Automotive electronics are a bright light for the semiconductor industry, and expectations for additional electronic applications in vehicles are high. The semiconductor industry is betting on the growth of key components in vehicles. There are a lot of innovative ideas within the automotive industry in several different areas. Cars and trucks are connecting to the cloud and to other vehicles. Cars will communicate with each other using short- and long-range communication chips.
The Wafer Demand Summary and Assumptions is a quarterly publication. It includes an excel spreadsheet with annual wafer demand by product by technology from 2010-2022. Product categories include DRAM, SRAM, NAND, NOR, Other Non-volatile, MPU, MCU, DSP, Computing MOS Logic, Communications MOS Logic, Consumer MOS Logic, Automotive MOS Logic, Other MOS Logic, Programmable Logic, Standard Cell, Gate Array, Analog, Discrete, Optoelectronics, Sensors and Digital Bipolar.
It has been true for many years in the semiconductor industry that even very complex applications require a range of design solutions and do not always require the most expensive solution. While it is true that SoCs with the highest design costs probably contain the most complexity, it does not necessarily follow that every product in a given geometry must also incur the same high costs to be competitive. Silicon designers and system architects are constantly looking for ways to reduce their design costs and still meet market requirements and ASP targets.
There is a large and growing energy harvesting market opportunity outside of large solar installations and commercial power generation. A broad range of markets will employ energy harvesting to either replace batteries or extend battery life. These applications cover wireless sensor nodes (WSN) for bridges, infrastructure, building automation and controls, and home automation (including lighting, security and environmental). Energy harvesting will grow in automotive applications, cell phones, wearables and other consumer electronics.
Automotive electronics are a bright light for the semiconductor industry, as smartphone growth slows, and personal computing growth continues to decline. The expectation is that automotive electronics will become the next big technology market driver. The automotive semiconductor market will exceed the overall industry growth as semiconductor content expands with added features and functionality. The desire to put self-driving vehicles on the road is creating increased interest in innovative automotive solutions as well as increased semiconductor demand.
The semiconductor industry today is faced with several substantial issues-not the least of which are the continuing rise in design costs for complex SoCs, the decrease in the incidence of first-time-right designs and the increase in the design cycle time against shrinking market windows and decreasing product life cycles. An additional factor has now been added to SoC design costs with the emergence of very complicated software applications intended to run on the SoC silicon.
