Lionel Sujay Vailshery
Research expert covering the consumer electronics industry
Get in touch with us nowEmbedded systems
As the name suggests, this is a system developed with hardware attached or embedded to serve a specific purpose on a device. A fitting example would be home appliances such as refrigerators or air conditioners. The primary purpose of such devices is to keep the temperature constant, and a microcontroller serves this purpose. The embedded microcontroller reads the set temperature and signals the compressor for a precise amount of cooling or heating to be provided to reach the set temperature. This is just a basic example, but the applications of such embedded microcontrollers are vast, from a simple digital wristwatch to much more complex systems such as communication and navigation systems. The latest adoption of such technology is the eSIM, or an embedded SIM, on smartphones and smartwatches. With lower power consumption and the cost of acquiring hardware combined with minimal maintenance and failure rates, these embedded systems play a significant role in our daily lives.Future of microcontrollers
With the broader adoption of smart or connected devices in the realm of the Internet of Things, microcontrollers are becoming ubiquitous in modern products and machinery. TinyML, or tiny machine learning, is a field in machine learning and embedded systems that bring together the world of artificial intelligence(AI) and microcontrollers. This combination enables analytics to be run on a device without the need for sending data to a cloud computing server. Such edge devices not only process the data and provide inference with low latency but also reduce data breaches, allowing for a remarkably high level of data privacy. With the progress being made in AI and microprocessor architecture, we will see more expansive applications of this technology in more devices for improved efficiency in computing power with lower energy consumption.
