Enabling the smart-connected home – ISQED 2011
March 16, 2011, ISQED, Santa Clara,Ca—Manas Saksena, director of technology at Marvell Semiconductor looked at the opportunities and challenges for the semiconductor industry in “smart homes”. The combination of wi-fi integrated with a microcontroller and memory enables extensions into new markets and applications.
The emergence of the iPad and other tablet computers opens the house for new ways to measure and control appliances. The screen size, wireless connectivity, simple yet useful user interface, and small apps for various functions makes the tablet an ideal platform for controlling other devices. Emerging tablets have differences in screen size, but all can provide high-end data services by accessing more compute power and memory from the cloud. The tablets can also interface to other platforms like Blu-ray players, game consoles, and even other computers.
Wireless, usually as wi-fi is now available in many data appliances like printers, speakers, and even non-IT equipment like blood pressure monitors. Now, the industry can look at moving the consumer experience into the rest of the electronics in the house. The appliances constitute a range of devices that gather or send data and can send those data to a screen. These connected appliances usually have minimal internal electronics and work in a different supply chain than other CE devices.
One significant difference that appliances have from other consumer devices is that they all consume large amounts of energy. Increasing intelligence and connectivity in appliances enables demand response-load control functions to help reduce peak energy use. By changing from a random startup to a controlled one, the appliance can reduce peak demand. The consumer becomes a partner in a triumvirate of utility, information, and user.
Already, utilities are moving towards demand-based pricing models to manage energy use and are asking consumers to work with them to actively manage appliance use. Smart appliances can change their operating modes to reflect variations in energy prices. At the large-grain level, consumers can move starting times for elective operations to sub-peak hours, after 6 PM. At the fine-grain level, the grid could tell your refrigerator to wait until another machine stops before starting.
All of this interactivity and connectivity require standards, a smart energy profile. Communications are settling on IPv6 and TCP/IP and will use Web services standards. Top level applications will have to operate across many platforms, so there is a need for data interchange and format standards. A RESTful API can provide access to the URLs for the resources and operations associated with the machines and can connect through a publish-subscribe handshake to move operating data to a screen.
These appliance data can move over the Web when the communications functions are integrated with wifi. The challenges are that there is no existing software to manage the functions, and new business models have to be developed to enable companies and utilities to monetize the range of services.
