The article entitled "In a smart-system world, data’s ‘the new currency’" was published on 7 November 2011 and provides interesting information on how Smart Systems are considered key products and how they are of strategic importance for future markets and for society as a whole.
To view the full article, go to the EE|Times website
at:
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4230381/In-a-smart-system-world--data-s--the-new-currency-?pageNumber=0
Some key sentences from the article:
Today’s smart systems, able to handle automated tasks intuitively, combine data center analytics with embedded computers to create value for enterprises and consumers. Today’s smart systems can intuitively handle tasks that until now have been impossible to automate in real-time. And by mining the resultant sea of real-time data coming in from billions of streams worldwide, analytics science is creating services that have even more value than the smart systems themselves.
There’s a seething mass of smart systems already at work in virtually every electronics sector: automotive, industrial, communications, computing, transportation, energy, medical and personal health maintenance. In fact, according to the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, such “cyber-physical systems” will eventually constitute 50 percent of all electronics worldwide, making them a U.S. strategic asset.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology recently announced a standardization effort to define interfaces for interoperability, as well as metrics and methods for measuring and comparing performance among smart systems. Crafting a standard design methodology for smart systems—similar to the very-large-scale integration (VLSI) design methodology championed by Carver Mead and Lynn Conway in the 1970s-—will keep the United States ahead of global competition in smart systems, according to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
And just as Carver and Conway advised separating the design task from the underlying semiconductor process technologies (virtually inventing modern EDA in the process), smart system planners “need to decouple the design of systems from the specific fabrication technology used to produce them,” according to the Report to the President on Ensuring American Leadership in Advanced Manufacturing.
Market watcher International Data Corp. (Framingham, Mass.) recently reported that nearly 2 billion smart systems per year are already being sold, making for a $1 trillion market that IDC predicts will grow to 4 billion units and $2 trillion by 2015.
The most valuable services performed by smart systems, according to IDC, result from the application of analytics to real-time data streams. “Data is the new currency,” said Mario Morales, vice president of semiconductor research at IDC. “And the companies that understand this are the ones already developing the analytics and infrastructure to extract that value—companies like IBM, HP, Intel, Microsoft, TI, Freescale and Oracle.
IDC has been covering embedded computers for over a decade but only recently started delineating “intelligent systems” as the successor to the embedded space. And IDC is not the only market forecaster claiming that smart systems are the future. Applied Business Intelligence Inc. (New York), for one, recently started a “smart cities and grids” research service.
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