Ten technologies that will shake the CE world

CHANGE, OF COURSE , is a constant in electronics, and at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, our editors found evidence aplenty of the shifts under way in CE. Here are 10 technologies that we’re betting will alter the consumer electronics landscape this year.

Motion processing

In 2012, mobile device makers will begin integrating complete inertial navigation units housing pre-calibrated accelerometers, gyros and magnetometers. Invensense recently announced a complete INU in a single, 4-mm-square package, enabling almost any mobile device to offer LBS, augmented reality and asset tracking. — R. Colin Johnson

In general-purpose computing on graphics processing units, or “GPU compute,” certain computations traditionally handled by a system CPU or application processor are offloaded to the GPU. The addition of programmable pipelines, schedulers and floating-point precision to the graphics rendering pipeline enables GPU-compute technology, but until now a lack of system- and software-level support has hindered its progress. That’s changing with the introduction of APIs and parallel-capable programming languages such as CUDA, DirectX compute, OpenCL, OpenGL Shading Language and Renderscript compute.

Offloading inner parallel loops of programs from the CPU to the GPU can improve performance and save power. The ability of the GPU to lower power consumption, as well as to influence the look and feel of displays, the responsiveness of games and the user interface, makes it potentially more important than the CPU.

The addition of GPU compute to the GPU’s established graphics rendering duties are another step in reducing the CPU to just a housekeeping processor or host. Applications already being computed on GPUs include the physics of moving objects as part of scene calculation prior to rendering; applications that can benefit from GPU compute include math functions, 2- and 3-D field solvers, simulators, encryption, sorting and alignment, and some database functions.

A PowerVR Series 5 GPU can compute the physics of the above scene, including carpet movement, as well as rendering the resultant image. Source: Imagination Technologies Group plc

Enablers of the trend include Nvidia, with its graphics chips and CUDA parallel programming platform; the Khronos industry organization, which provides API definitions such as OpenCL and OpenGL; ARM, with its Mali line of GPUs, including versions (the T604 and T658) that have been architected with GPU compute in mind; and Imagination Technologies, with its PowerVR line of GPU cores.
— Peter Clarke

Google Android will be to the next decade what Microsoft Windows was to the 1990s. It will be the software platform that will enable many of the most interesting and diverse devices to emerge in electronics.

For decades, the industry has sought—usually in vain—a common base of free, open-source software. The 1980s saw the quest for a unified Unix for computers. More recently, the search was for a single version of mobile and embedded Linux to power everything from mainstream smartphones, tablets and connected TVs to systems on the factory floor.

Google’s Android has come closer than anything in the past to fulfilling the dream. As ARM-based processors strengthen their processing punch, Android will emerge as an operating system for notebooks and PCs.

In smartphones, Android has already surpassed Apple’s iOS and other alternatives in shipments. Its broad support among handset makers is its best guarantee of a robust and long life for use in all systems. Google’s recent work to merge tablet and smartphone variants in version 4.0, called Ice Cream Sandwich, has put the codebase on a solid footing, at least for the moment.

But there are bumps in the road ahead. Android uses Dalvik, a nontraditional Java virtual machine. Java’s owner, Oracle, is suing Google to get rid of Dalvik. If Oracle wins the suit, Java, the previous best hope for software unification, will get a boost at the risk of torpedoing Android.

Android is still relatively immature; it was just in 2011 that Google pledged to support USB on the platform. But there are plenty of tools available to dress up Android for different roles. Mentor Graphics jumped in early. More recently, Wind River fielded tools and Android variants for embedded systems. — Rick Merritt

Designed with touchscreens in mind and capable of supporting mouse, keyboard or stylus input, Windows 8 is the first version of Microsoft’s popular operating system to support ARM as well as X86 processors.

The OS sports an interface based on Microsoft’s typography-based design language, Metro, created for use in Windows Phone 7. The user interface consists of a ribbon of updating tiles—offering apps from e-mail to social networking, calendars to contact lists—and requires a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 or higher.

Metro’s look and feel has also been applied to Internet Explorer 10, the HTML5 browser to go with Microsoft’s new OS. Those who prefer a more traditional Windows feel, however, can disable the Metro UI via Windows Registry settings.

Win8 offers such features as new picture-based authentication; native USB 3.0 support; a built-in Windows app store; and support for multiple monitors, able to display different background images and customized taskbars, for a true multi-PC experience. The OS includes a packaged application model called AppX, based on Silverlight, as well as Open Packaging Conventions. It can be run directly off of a USB-connected drive in a Windows To Go format, targeted at enterprise apps.

To cater further to the cloud crowd, Microsoft has enabled a local-PC experience across different computers using Windows Live ID, which saves user account settings and applies them wherever a person signs in.
The operating system’s Hybrid Boot capability brings faster startup and shutdown functionality, though the feature does not mean devices running ARM versions of Win8 will be able to run other OSes, such as Android.

 

Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments have all said they will offer devices running Windows 8, but so far demos of the OS on ARM processors have been tightly controlled by Microsoft. — Sylvie Barak

Touch-based human-machine interfaces took the electronics market by storm in 2011, but touch-free interfaces are growing fast.

Touch-free human interfaces debuted commercially with the Xbox Kinect, based on PrimeSense Ltd.’s platform, whose infrared emitters and detectors can recognize human gestures made in midair. A host of other camera-based touch-free human interfaces are being readied for 2012, including a Microsoft solution acquired last year from Canesta Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.).

Microsoft is slated to introduce a family of IR-based human-gesture interfaces for mobile devices based on the Canesta IR chip’s use of pixel-level time-of-flight calculations to deduce the distance to any object in a scene, regardless of lighting, occlusion by other objects or blending-of objects with the background.

Texas Instruments recently announced an alternative touch-free interface solution that leverages its LightCrafter digital light processor (DLP). Using structured-light illumination, stripes of light are projected onto the user’s hands. The resultant distortions in the light strips can be measured by a conventional image chip, resulting in algorithms that can deduce the 3-D shape of the hand.
 
FlashScan3D (Richardson, Texas) is already using TI’s LightCrafter in a technology that can read fingerprints without requiring touch. Many more applications are promised this year.

TI is also working with Neonode Technologies AB (Stockholm, Sweden), which is supplying infrared optical detectors that are built into the bezel around the touchscreens of e-readers from Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Sony. Similar to larger versions made by NextWindow (Pleasanton, Calif.) for Hewlett-Packard’s TouchSmart PCs, Neonode’s mobile device version allows users to operate devices without the need to press fingers against the display, thus reducing fingerprints. — R. Colin Johnson

Siri, the cloud-based intelligent agent that executes verbal commands, can directly answer queries in a naturally conversational way that could marginalize search engines. Siri is the brainchild of a Defense Advanced Research Project Agency program and began life as the Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO). The CALO work at the Stanford Research Institute was spun off as a commercial company in 2007, acquired by Apple in 2010 and made available on the iPhone 4S in 2011.

Siri’s cloud-based natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities combine voice recognition technology from Nuance Communications with voice command capability for Apple apps and query-handling technology from WolframAlpha. Users issue voice commands to dial the phone, send text messages, post calendar items, set reminders, get directions, send e-mails, check the weather forecast, find out the latest stock prices, set wakeup alarms, browse the address book, take notes or play music selections.

Voice queries utilize WolframAlpha’s knowledge base to answer questions. When it cannot satisfy a request using WolframAlpha, Siri will offer to forward the query to a search engine of the user’s choosing (similar to Google Voice).

Other players have been getting NLU ready for prime time. IBM this year is expected to adapt its Watson question-answering AI, derived from the Open Advancement of Question Answering initiative, to answer medical doctors’ questions. — R. Colin Johnson

Carbon nanotubes and planar graphene sheets are poised to revolutionize electronics, eventually displacing most of the metal and silicon in electronic devices—and, in the process, enabling faster, lighter and lower-power products.

Today, this new material is only being used where it is sorely needed, such as to replace the increasingly rare and expensive indium-tin oxide in flat-panel displays. Nanotube inks can be deposited with inkjet printers to pattern transparent electrode arrays for displays or even solar cells. And since carbon circuitry can be printed at low temperatures, applications that require flexible substrates, like OLEDs, are turning to carbon-based inks, whose electron mobility is10 times greater than that of the organic materials used today.

Carbon’s thermal properties are also tunable—a characteristic that has resulted in the development of nanotube tape, which could begin replacing traditional solder pads in 2012.

Graphene deposited in planar sheets could eventually replace metal interconnects, semiconductors and insulating oxides. IBM recently showed a 2-GHz transistor using graphene, and Texas Instruments recently showed progress on growing graphene across whole wafers.

At Brookhaven National Laboratory, graphene was recently shown to boost supercapacitors into the same energy density regime as rechargeable batteries, but with much longer lifetimes—25 years—than batteries.
Researchers are also investigating graphene’s ballistic electron transport, hoping to harness quantum, optical and magnetic effects for computing, communications and higher-density memory circuits, respectively. — R. Colin Johnson

Embedded vision merges embedded systems with computer vision. Efforts are under way to bring in computer vision, via digital processing and intelligent algorithms, to interpret meaning in images or video. Powerful, low-cost, and energy-efficient processors are key enablers of the technology.

Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect hands-free game controller uses embedded vision to track players’ movements. Rapid proliferation of embedded vision solutions is envisioned in the next few years for a wealth of applications. Embedded Vision Alliance (EVA) founder Jeff Bier believes, for example, that embedded vision-based safety systems in cars could dramatically reduce the number of vehicle accidents.

Last year, a group of companies led by Berkeley Design Technology Inc. organized the EVA to guide system developers in designing practical embedded vision platforms, including the selection of chips, cameras, algorithms, tools and programming languages. Among the roster of 20-plus EVA members are semiconductor companies working on platforms of devices and design tools. They include Advanced Micro Devices, Analog Devices, CEVA, Freescale Semiconductor, Intel, Maxim, Nvidia, Texas Instruments and Xilinx.

EVA members will tackle the challenges still standing in the way of the technology’s becoming a common feature in gesture recognition systems. On the to-do list for the multidisciplinary field are appropriate developments in lighting, optics, image sensors, processors, complex algorithms and software code. — Nicolas Mokhoff

Home health hubs concentrate the data streaming from various sensing systems in patients’ homes. A single wireless router connects cloud resources to environmental sensors (for temperature, humidity and air-quality), medical sensors (such as in blood-pressure monitors, glucose meters, weight scales and pulse oximeters) and wearable sensors that can invoke a personal emergency response system (PERS). Many homes today are connected to the Internet with a Wi-Fi router, but home health hubs cannot have dead spots; thus they require a more secure layer of wireless connectivity.

Home health hubs are already being marketed by forward-looking medical service providers, such as Independa Inc., which showed its system at the CES Digital Health Summit. Independa’s Artemis software monitors medical and safety devices, as well as home-environment sensors, via an Hbox wireless hub, manufactured by Boston Life Labs. The Hbox streams the concentrated data to Independa’s cloud servers for logging and medical analytics.

Freescale has a reference design for home health hubs that integrates Wi-Fi, Ethernet, USB, Bluetooth and ZigBee into a router that communicates both to cloud resources, such as Microsoft’s HealthVault, and to a patient’s tablet. It in-cludes a sub-gigahertz radio that can activate a PERS. — R. Colin Johnson

Location-based services are accessible via mobile devices through mobile networks. Market watcher Pyramid expects mobile operators’ LBS revenues to reach $10.3 billion in 2015, up from $2.8 billion in 2010.

At the LBS base level, positioning-technology vendors provide hardware or software solutions for determining the user’s location. Assisted GPS (A-GPS) is used to improve the startup performance, or time-to-first-fix, of a satellite-based positioning system and is used extensively with GPS-capable cell phones. A-GPS acquires and stores information about the location of satellites via the cellular network and uses proximity to cell towers to calculate position when GPS signals are not available.

At CES, A-GPS chip supplier CSR showed how its SiRFstarV and SiRFusion platforms enable indoor navigation. The platform chips support GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and Compass satellites, and enable the “fusion” of multiple radio signals and sensor inputs to provide accurate location data continuously. The SiRFatlasV ARM 11/DSP dual-core architecture seamlessly integrates with CSR’s audio and connectivity platforms.

Broadcom became an A-GPS solutions provider through its Global Locate acquisition. Its BCM4750 GPS receiver integrates a baseband section with a low-noise radio front end and is designed to interface with host processors in personal navigation devices. Broadcom claims that since the BCM4750 is a host-based GPS IC, it delivers the highest positioning performance for the smallest pc board area. — Nicolas Mokhoff