Driving the Internet of Things

h THE INTERNET OF THINGS is the technical evolution of the proliferation of embedded processing and the ubiquitous connectivity of networking infrastructure. It wasn’t the result of a big grand strategy. It’s just begun to happen, and it is gaining momentum at a rapid pace. In fact in 2010, the number of devices connected to the Internet already exceeded the number of humans, and it is predicted that over the next four or five years that number will be up to 50 billion connected devices. 50 billion devices is an amazing number, and some people are saying this is an understatement of what is probably going to happen. There are a lot of practical implications associated with this growth. The networking infrastructure implications alone are pretty phenomenal. For our industry, this presents both great opportunities and challenges for us. If the Internet is to reach everywhere, then embedded processing solutions need to get a lot smaller. There just won’t be enough space in these systems for the standard approach. As an example, Freescale introduced the world’s smallest ARM-based 32-bit microcontroller (see Figure 1). This ‘‘ant-sized’’ microcontroller device is moving us closer to the concept of digital dust, where tiny smart sensing devices around us are Editor’s notes: This article is based on a keynote talk presented by the author at the 50th DAC. It discusses the opportunities and challenges of multi-billion connected devices, known as Internet of Things, and its implications on the design, EDA and test community. VYervant Zorian, Synopsys Gregg Lowe gives his keynote address.