Gale Morrison of Semiconductor Engineering recently penned an article about the various challenges associated with building smart cities of the future. As Morrison notes, governments around the globe are beginning to tap into a world of connected devices and sensors for reasons ranging from cheaper lighting to less traffic, lower crime and improved air quality.
Emerging Solutions
Future smart buildings will adapt and learn
Tom Carroll of JLL property services recently penned an article for the UK-based publication Computing that explores the future of intelligent buildings. As Carroll explains, advanced sensors and the ubiquitous adoption of mobile devices, combined with the rapidly burgeoning IoT, will transform the services a building is capable of offering.
Solid State Circuits Magazine highlights lensless smart sensors
A Rambus VLSI Symposium paper on lensless smart sensor (LSS) technology has been cited in Solid State Circuits Magazine.
“In an invited paper, Rambus presented an overview of lensless smart sensors that rely on phase-modulated diffraction gratings above a conventional imaging array. Compared to a lens, this More-than-Moore diffraction grating, seen in Figure 6, can be designed for wide wavelength bands and has a lower profile for thinner sensors,” the publication stated.
Silicon Republic talks Lensless Smart Sensors (LSS)
Silicon Republic journalists recently put together a list of 13 pioneering technology projects currently underway at Cork’s Tyndall National Institute, including vibration energy harvesting, PiezoMEMS, Micro-transfer printing, electrochemical energy storage and Lensless Smart Sensors (LSS).
Microsoft catapults FPGAs to new heights
Karl Freund of Moore Insights and Strategy recently penned an article for Forbes about Microsoft’s extensive deployment of FPGA’s in the data center and beyond.
As Freund notes, Microsoft currently uses field programmable gate arrays to accelerate its Bing search engine (Project Catapult) along with its Azure Cloud, which has at least one FPGA in each server – delivering over one “exa op” (one billion operations per second) of total throughput across data centers in 15 countries.
Video: Enabling augmented reality (AR) with lensless smart sensors
Rambus Lensless Smart Sensors (LSS) take a novel approach to sensing by combining ultra-small diffractive gratings with standard image sensors to deliver advanced capabilities in a form factor ideal for AR and VR devices.
So, how does LSS work? Put simply, light passes through the diffractive grating and is intelligently spread onto the image sensor to form an unrecognizable, yet information-rich blob that contains all relevant data about a user’s gaze. Due to its small footprint, LSS can be mounted in the frames of everyday eyewear.