by Angela Guess
Narbeh Derhacobian recently wrote in TechCrunch, “It’s been almost 10 years since Apple unveiled the iPhone. Since that day, the smartphone has been the overwhelming driver of innovation in the technology industry. Cameras, Wi-Fi, batteries, touch sensors, baseband processors and memory chips — in less than a decade, these components have made stunning advances to keep up with consumer demand to have sleeker, more powerful devices every year. For chip makers, the pressure has been to produce smaller, more powerful components for each generation of phones. Denser, faster, cheaper — these mantras have driven our industry for as long as most people can remember. But there’s a new game in town. The smartphone era is not over, but the growth rate is slowing. The key growth driver in hardware could soon be the Internet of Things. Over the next decade, this industry will churn out tens of billions of connected sensor devices. These will be used in every corner of the world — from highways to arteries — to gather new insights to help us live and work better.”
Derhacobian goes on, “This chapter will reshape the technology hardware industry in profound ways, and even reverse many of the changes brought about by the smartphone era. To understand how profound this shift could be, it’s important to know how past markets have shaped the way computers are built. Just a few short decades ago, computers filled entire rooms. In these early days, manufacturers produced each component separately and wired them together on a circuit board. You’d have memory in one part of the board, logic processing on another side, maybe a radio in the corner. Wires or copper traces connected each piece, and components could be easily added or removed from the system. The ‘System on a Board’ configuration worked for a while. But then computers began to shrink as scientists engineered smaller and smaller transistors. Transistors are like electric switches — the fundamental building blocks of modern computing.”
Photo credit: Flickr/ Skley