A new report published by Transparency Market Research confirms the global smart sensor market will hit $21.60 billon by 2019.
“Rapidly increasing sales of various types of consumer electronics and automobiles is the major factor driving demand for smart/intelligent sensors,” TMR analysts stated in their report summary. “In present times, smart/intelligent sensors are [already] an important part of smartphones, tablets, PCs, automobiles and medical equipment with advanced features.”
In addition, smart/intelligent sensors offer significant applications in healthcare, automotive design, collision prevention and oil platforms.
“This is due to the compactness and diverse functionality of smart/intelligent sensors in their present form,” adds the report.
As we’ve previously discussed on Rambus Press, the steady progression of Moore’s Law is helping to accelerate the development and adoption of smart sensor technology.
“The Internet of Things (IoT) has prompted the semiconductor industry to place an emphasis on more efficiently capturing, securing, moving and analyzing an increasing volume of digital data,” explained Steve Woo, VP of Solutions Marketing and distinguished inventor at Rambus.
“Rambus shares the industry’s vision of 50 billion connected devices by 2020, which will also include always-on, always-connected smart sensor endpoints tasked with capturing and delivering a wide range of data. Moore’s Law is a critical factor in making this vision a reality.”
Indeed, says Woo, the size of refractive imagers is currently limited by optics. However, many applications don’t actually require extensive high resolution imaging capabilities provided by a standard lens-based configuration.
“How can we build even smaller imagers? By replacing the traditional camera lens with a diffraction grating, while leveraging advanced algorithms and chip processing capabilities,” he continued. “Now this is where Moore’s Law comes into play, because it continues to help enable the technology necessary for Rambus scientists to create and refine miniature, lensless smart sensors (LSS) that can be as small as the size of a human hair. While Moore’s Law has been a driving force in the computing industry for decades, we’re seeing a growing number of benefits in computation imaging and sensing applications such as LSS.”
According to Woo, Rambus’ low power sipping sensors can perform a wide range of functions, including image change detection, point tracking, range finding, sophisticated gesture recognition, object recognition and image capturing.
“These versatile capabilities make LSS technology suitable for at least five key ‘smart’ verticals, including consumer, cities, transportation, manufacturing and medical,” he added.
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