Panasonic Talks Smart Everything
February 18, 2013, ISSCC, San Francisco—Yoshiyuki Miyabe from Panasonic suggested some smart life solutions from home to city in his plenary talk. He noted the directions of all electronics is moving towards more consumer-based functions, and the challenges for the industry to get to 2030.
Energy is becoming an important limiter for growth in many areas. In addition, lifestyles are changing as populations age and move to urban areas. Electronics has the potential to bring more information and communications into the lives and can change the world. The pace of change enables new features that were previously unattainable.
For example, in ’77 a micro-controller had 1K of ROM, by ’00, that number was over 384K. In a similar way, TVs started with 22 tubes in ’53, growing to 27 tubes in a color set by ’60, to all transistors in ’70. By ’80, there were 50k transistors in a TV, and over 1M in ’90. Today, a TV will have over 100M transistors to handle functions like remote control and interface to the Internet.
Despite the increase in functionality, the controls are not getting more complex, but have changed to a different user interface. The growing personalization of TV now includes facial recognition and links to social media. The next-generation systems will be connected via IP networks to the cloud.
The SoC to run the TVs need to be adaptive, to manage communications over a variable bit rate channel. The on-screen display will use HTML5 to provide useable information to the user. The TVs will need a number of noise cancellation capabilities to become 4k ready and will have over 700M transistors.
Digital consumer electronics gave us better entertainment. Smart consumer electronics will give us social connections. The increase in networking and the addition of new services like energy management will provide us with smart life solutions. These new capabilities will need access to the cloud and will take advantage of machine-to-machine communications.
The apps and other functions will key on communications, so the move to 60GHz in a WiGig wireless environment will help to take much of the current traffic off of the WiFi network. This short-range data transport, IEEE 802.11ad has been implemented in a prototype chip for proof of concept.
Not only entertainment, but also appliances will become smarter. The near-field communications will enable remote control of various functions, so a weight scale could text you about your diet, an activity meter tracks your energy expenditure, all through a NFC link to a hub connected to the cloud.
These devices will need micro-controllers, NFC, cryptography, and the WiGig radios. Once they are developed, your smart mirror could do a skin analysis through the embedded camera to tell if you are developing some medical condition. Non-touch sensors could sense if you are happy or not.
While personal activities and care are important, the use of energy is still a limiting factor. The industry needs to reduce the energy to operate the sensors, develop energy management and demand response controls, and integrate all of them into the smart city. Energy management on a city-wide scale requires full integration with the cloud.
Environmental controls have to take into account the user’s history and local weather. The system has to integrate with the photovoltaic management tools, and the whole system has to plan supply and demand to balance charge and discharge cycles with the optimizations for lowest cost for all aspects. There are a number of cities in Asia that are acting as demonstration projects for many aspects of the smart city.
Automotive systems will include car to infrastructure communications and connections to the cloud. The main mode of communications will use the 3G or 4G wide area cell phone technologies. One area that merits greater investigation is intersection control. Over half of the accidents are in intersections in Japan, and other countries have similar statistics. Increasing the visibility and information to the driver will help to reduce this number.
Another issue is to share data and link cars into a virtual train. This operating mode reduces energy costs and accidents. The issue for cars is the car-to-infrastructure communications need to be high speed and low latency, while providing authentication and other services. The data has to be available in under 3 seconds per car per intersection of the time that the car will get to the intersection. Currently, there are no standards, although OFDM is emerging as a global de facto mode of operation.
In the future, all functions will be interconnected and integrated. The whole system of systems will include compute, video, and other communications. The technology will become more complex, but the increased technology will be isolated from the user. Various forms of machine-to-machine data transfers will be connected through the cloud. Processors will have more DSP and other specialized accelerators to connect the sensors and communications into a useable solution. All devices will become intelligent and connected, and the semiconductors will be the key to the required innovation. There are infinite possibilities.
