These Trends Will Shape Embedded Technology in 2017 Posted on : Dec 15 - 2016

It looks like 2017 is shaping up to be an interesting year in the embedded-technology space—for a variety of reasons. We’re coming off a year that saw a number of large mergers, and the change in the U.S. political climate is significant.

Tom Starnes, analyst with Objective Analysis, notes, “One country's loss is another’s gain as corporations try to hold on to as much of their revenues as they can in very complex and competitive markets for sophisticated technology. Meantime, the very-global chip industry has been consolidating at a rate and with a mass not seen before, with all but a few companies struggling for profitability.”

Jim Handy says, “Objective Analysis expects the memory business to be highly profitable in 2017, followed by a collapse beginning in mid-2018.”

Not only will the chip industry be chaotic, but most of the related technologies will experience new and disruptive advances. I’ll highlight only five hot topic areas at this point just to keep things manageable:

• The Internet of Things (IoT)

• Processor technology

• Artificial intelligence

• Storage

• Virtual reality and augmented reality 

The IoT and Embedded Software

The Internet of Things (IoT) will continue to be a market that involves everyone, but confusion reigns supreme. Developers get a break if they determine whether they’re targeting IoT for consumer, commercial, or industrial applications, as these have much different characteristics when it comes to networking, management, and security.

IoT-specific hardware will benefit many applications, but software remains the key to successful IoT solutions. “Software continues to take on a proportionally larger role in functionality, safety, and security for IoT devices, relative to hardware,” says Andrew Girson, CEO of Barr Group. “The enforcement of discipline and quality in the coding process through coding standards such as MISRA is growing. However, as indicated by Barr Group’s 2016 Embedded Safety & Security Survey, as a profession, we still have a long way to go when it comes to using industry best practices for the development of safer and more secure embedded systems.”

Developers that deliver quality code, not just for safety- and security-related applications, will have an edge in the IoT space because over-the-air updates only help to address problems after the fact. Though wireless connectivity significantly reduces corrections in the field, the cost of bugs still grows exponentially as code moves from the developer through testing to deployment.

“The reality is, safety and security are clearly coupled. We believe that systems are not safe without security,” says Jim McElroy, Vice president of marketing for LDRA. “Industry concern is accelerating pertaining to security, and in 2017, we expect to see our customers needing to comply with the developing security standards, as they have done in the functional safety area.”

MISRA is one of the best options for C and C++ developers, although programming languages like Java and even Ada offer improvements that should not be overlooked. Good tools, such as static analysis, will return significant benefits to IoT developers.

Developers will also need to contend with more security-related hardware features. This is good if they can take advantage of the hardware, but it means incorporating security into the application’s design.

Processor Technology

Advances in processor technology will continue to push IoT applications, though all embedded applications will benefit from higher performance, lower power requirements, and increased connectivity. In particular, ARM and its partners have made a significant investment in IoT solutions. This year will see the delivery of the latest Cortex-M23 and Cortex-M33 platforms that incorporate advanced security support as a standard component.

However, developers should not overlook ARM alternatives. MIPS and x86 solutions often make more sense depending on the application. In addition, a new player has arrived, especially in terms of the custom system-on-chip (SoC) arena: RISC-V.

RISC-V is actually an instruction set architecture (ISA) that provides the same type of application and tool portability exhibited by ARM, MIPS, and x86 platforms. RISC-V is finally available as a standard chip in the form of SiFive’s 32-bit Freedom E310, available on the HiFive1 Arduino-compatible board (Fig. 1). Microsemi is also including RISC-V soft-core support in its line of FPGAs. These two platforms will prove handy by allowing developers to kick the tires. However, the big impact will be felt with custom SoCs. RISC-V is also defined for 64- and 128-bit architectures, but the 64-bit space will be a much more difficult nut to crack.

Artificial Intelligence

DNN and deep learning are just one aspect of artificial intelligence (AI), yet it’s the hot topic right now. AI is moving quickly from research to production because it can address such a wide range of applications, including object identification—a critical aspect for applications like automotive advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). DNN is also being used to improve handwriting recognition, noise cancellation, and much more.

The thing to keep in mind, though, is that DNN works well for many applications, but it is not a definitive solution for all applications. In fact, it will not replace most procedural application controls.

DNN solutions can often be set up as a black box, making them easier to incorporate into an application that might need something like object recognition. On the other hand, coming up with new networks for new applications can be very challenging.

Don’t overlook other AI technology, as quite a bit is already in use (ranging from expert systems to behavior-based robotics). These are often complementary to DNN technology. The interest in DNN is likely to push more interest in other AI technology. View More