Last March (yeah, time flies), I attended Sensorscon in San Jose. The event was insightful, with a wide variety of participants and speakers. The consistent theme of the speakers was that sensors will proliferate and broadly penetrate our lives. I saw some pretty big numbers there, such as a $19.5B market by 2016, and sensors in each smartphone approaching 20 by 2015. There are many driving factors behind these numbers, such as ubiquitous data collection through sensor networks, better health through lower cost consumer medical devices, and improved user experiences on our consumer electronics devices.

The recent explosion in the sensor market has not been driven by wide proliferation, but really, just a few device categories ramping to very high volumes with increasing sensor penetration per device. Mainly driven by, smartphones, gaming devices, and tablets. Sensor networks, medical devices, and really everything else, is peanuts.

What was interesting to me was the opportunity behind the opportunity. How many sensors does a phone need? Could a few really intelligent sensors replace the dozen plus used today? Consumers value an elegant user experience and advertisers value knowing where you are and what you’re doing, but does that mean more sensors? Or, could it be just smarter sensors? What was evident is that to date, very much a “brute force” approach has been taken by the industry. Brute force can get the job done fast, but it can also be unnecessarily expensive.

There were some early public indications of a smarter approach at Sensorscon. Start-ups dedicated to developing the software to get more from the hardware, and companies working together to establish software related standards. Not just sensor algorithms, but “smarts” through analysis, and in some cases, crunching through large amounts of data remotely, to get more out of each sensor. I also know first-hand that similar effort and investment is being made within device manufacturers. How do we do more (collect more data, improve user experience) at lower cost (e.g. fewer smarter, not more, sensors).

Reducing the number of unique sensors and finding ways to still add user functionality will be the job of software engineers and ultra-efficient processors. Processing the potentially massive amounts of data, in real time for some applications, has become the domain of integrated 32-bit processors, like the Synopsys ARC EM processor. The processor needs to be small and consume almost no power and generate almost no heat. The EM family does this while fitting into spaces as small as 0.01 mm2 and consuming as little as 2 uW/MHz.

But that’s not enough. This will be the domain of software engineers. Pervasive and easy to use development tools with highly efficient compilers are also important to embedded developers. Synopsys ARC EM processors are supported by the popular Eclipse-based IDE, MetaWare, as well as GNU tool chain.

With the right processors, the right tools, and the right engineers, I look forward to seeing us do a lot more with less.

Sensors are becoming more prolific and changing the way that you interact with your world. That smart phone in your pocket is a good example. A lot of what you can do with it is the result of sophisticated sensors that are built into it. For instance, the accelerometer inside determines the orientation in which you are holding the phone so the screen can switch making it easier to read. It also makes games that you control by moving the phone and applications like a bubble level possible. The accelerometer is actually a very sophisticated piece of technology, which is true of many of the sensors that are being developed today.

Controlling this new generation of sensors and interpreting the information that they generate requires a lot of compute power. This is increasingly being done with a 32-bit processor. The challenge is that the processor has to use almost no power and has to be infinitesimally small. The power consumption of a cell phone accelerometer is typically less than 100uA for the whole sensor. The processor has to use less than this but has to be able to process the necessary information in real-time. This requires a new class of 32-bit processor, and is one of the reasons that Synopsys developed the ARC EM family.

Targeted at sensors and other deeply embedded applications the EM family offers almost twice the performance of the processors used only 5 years ago to run a cellphone. The EM family does this while fitting into spaces as small as 0.01 mm2 and consuming as little as 2 uW/MHz.

As the sophistication of sensors continues to evolve the need for floating point calculations will grow to handle increasing levels of precision. Adding a floating point coprocessor is out of the question in sensors because of the extreme power and size limitations. While floating point calculations can be done on a 32-bit processor the performance will not be enough for many applications. Recognizing this Synopsys recently released a floating point unit that can be integrated with the EM processor cores. This floating point option (starting at 10K gates) requires only about 10% of the area and power of a coprocessor, but offers high performance for single and double precision math and complies with the IEEE-754 standard.

Because of the capabilities that they bring, sensor usage is growing geometrically and they are starting to show up everywhere and in everything. You interact with many more sensors every day than you do people. This is happening because of the new generation of 32-bit processors that are making devices possible that we could only dream about a few years ago. Can you imagine what we will be able to do five years from now!