SAE Update - April 2022 - 20

TECH FOCUS:
SOFTWARE
Embedded System Design Challenges
in the age of Open-Source and AI
customer anywhere in the
world. This mega-trend has
fundamentally disrupted
markets such as education
(online), retail (ecommerce),
entertainment (streaming),
commercial real estate
(virtualization), health
(telemedicine), and more.
Today, we are at the beginning
of the next major disruptive
cycle caused by computing. This
cycle consists of embedded
sensory devices (sometimes
known as Internet of Things),
local intelligence systems
(sometimes known as machine
learning), and global intelligence
(sometimes known as cloud
resources). Broadly called AI/IoT,
these three technologies are in
the process of disruptively
impacting nearly every market
segment where in-field sensing
with computation can solve
interesting problems. Medical,
mining, agriculture (land or
ocean), space operations, and of
course autonomous vehicles are
examples.
The sheer size of these megatrends
have driven significant
investments resulting in orderof-magnitude
acceleration of
innovation and development of
significant supply chains. For
20
April 2022
electronics, the critical industry is semiconductors
where the combination of technology innovation
(Moore's Law) and investments ($billions) has
delivered massive functionality. As a result, today,
semiconductor makers can easily build billions of
devices onto a single chip.
How does one manage billions of entities in a
design process, and how about the cost of doing so?
Akin to building a city, designing a modern highend
semiconductor chip is an expensive technological
challenge. To manage the complexity of design, a
multi-billion dollar industry called electronic design
automation (EDA) was created. To manage cost, the
semiconductor industry has developed the idea of
platforms - that is, devices which are generic and
can be customized for end market function (the birth
of software).
To date, the drivers of all of this work have been the
corporate and edge mega-markets described in the
image on page 19. Traditional embedded markets
ranging from aerospace to industrial systems have
benefited from innovations from the traditional
consumer markets. However, since the semiconductor
supply chain is optimized for the consumer market, the
result has also introduced significant challenges of
managing a supply chain (allocation, obsolescence and
reliability) where one is a minor participant. These
supply chain topics are discussed extensively by the
author in a series of articles in EPSNews, a publication
focused on electronics procurement and supply chain
as well as on the Anew website (www.anew-da.ai).
System design and
embedded systems
Traditionally, embedded design has largely taken a
closed system point-of-view. That is, at the point-ofUPDATE
https://www.epsnews.com/author/dr-rahul-razdan/ http://www.anew-da.ai
SAE Update - April 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of SAE Update - April 2022
