The technology landscape is undergoing a significant transformation. AI, Cybersecurity, Semiconductors and Renewable Energy have become important building blocks of today’s digital world. The developments taking place in the world of semiconductors, VLSI, embedded systems and connected technologies are transforming many industries such as the auto, defense, health care, agriculture and manufacturing sectors. Simultaneously, the shift to renewable energy, smart grids and intelligent energy systems has created new opportunities as well. According to Dr Vinaya Vijay Gohokar, professor at the School of Engineering and Technology, MIT-WPU, the convergence of these technologies is reshaping engineering and creating new opportunities across industries.
The technology of artificial intelligence has made significant progress towards leaving behind the realm of software and entering into the real world. It is now being incorporated into cars, robots, semiconductors production, medical devices, drones, intelligent cameras and machines. These systems have the ability to sense their surroundings, process complicated data and make decisions.
The current landscape of AI includes machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, generative AI, and edge intelligence. Among these, Edge AI plays an increasingly significant role in applications where there is a need for decision making in real time, low latency, reliability, and privacy of the data.
"Rather than uploading all the data into the cloud, these AI models can be executed within embedded devices like processors, microcontrollers, graphics processing units, and artificial intelligence accelerators," Gohokar explains.
The rapid development of connected and intelligent systems leads to the creation of a huge amount of data. The presence of sensors in such machines, automobiles, health care devices, electricity generating devices, semiconductor manufacturing devices, and other similar devices leads to continuous surveillance of their operations and environment. This continuous supply of data is turning out to be a useful source that can be utilized for enhancing the performance of these systems through techniques like prediction, anomaly detection, forecasting, and machine learning.
Makes cybersecurity an essential...
But, data-driven systems are only as reliable as the data and infrastructure on which they depend.
"This makes cybersecurity an essential part of the equation. Its role is no longer limited to computers and enterprise networks. In the light of increasing connectivity of physical systems, security is now an essential element of engineering," Gohokar said.
In today's world, vehicles, industrial controllers, IoT, medical devices, semiconductor systems and military equipment are all susceptible to cyber attacks. The area of automotive cybersecurity is emerging as one such field. Modern automobiles have a lot of electronic control units, sensors, communication and software systems built into them. With the emergence of connected and software defined cars, wireless communication and over-the-air software updates are becoming important.
Behind almost every advanced technology today lies a semiconductor. AI machines, EVs, mobile devices, health care devices, satellites, communication systems, and defense mechanisms, all of them rely on advanced semiconductor chips. The evolution of AI, as such, is resulting in increased demand for processors, graphics processing units (GPUs), AI accelerators, memory devices, and customized integrated circuits. VLSI plays an important role in this connection. "In the future, the semiconductor industry will require expertise in areas such as chip design, embedded systems, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and manufacturing," professor says.
The semiconductor industry is also benefiting from AI-driven design and manufacturing. This is because machine learning algorithms help in designing, testing, defect analysis, and process optimization of chips. In addition to this, hardware security is becoming increasingly important, with secure processors, hardware cryptography, trusted execution, and chip authentication becoming relevant. Thus, the future semiconductor ecosystem will need capabilities that range from VLSI, embedded systems, AI, cybersecurity, to manufacturing.
The digitisation revolution is also based on one more resource which is vital and that is 'energy'. Rapid development of such areas as data centres, electric cars, industrial automation and AI computing has resulted in the growth of the demand for energy that is both reliable and sustainable. As a result, there are new ways in which renewable energy technologies, energy storage, power electronics and smart grids can be used. Solar and wind power have some variability, which means that energy forecast and its efficient management become important aspects. Due to technologies such as advanced analytics and machine learning models that utilise information of weather, production and consumption, renewable-energy forecast and energy consumption optimisation becomes possible. Gohokar says, "such a convergence takes place as AI requires computing infrastructure, and computing infrastructure requires energy."
Converging technologies become especially evident in application-oriented industries. In terms of automotive technology, converging capabilities are found in advanced driver assistance systems, autonomous features, and predictive maintenance. High-end chips supply sufficient computational power, and cybersecurity ensures protection of vehicle platforms.
The growing use of autonomous drones, unmanned vehicles, intelligent surveillance and sensor-based systems is further increasing the demand for secure, reliable and high-performance computing at the edge at large. If we look into defence technology, this convergence is enabling advanced autonomous and sensor-driven systems. These technologies can support autonomous platforms, computer vision, object recognition, sensor fusion and decision-support applications. Advanced sensors and processors make such systems able to handle huge amounts of data in real time, whereas secure communications and cybersecurity play an important role in safeguarding mission-critical networks, platforms, and data.
In medical technology, intelligent computing is opening up new avenues for medical imaging, monitoring, diagnosis, and personalized medicine. The sensors and embedded processors allow the medical devices to continuously monitor and analyze physiological data, while connectivity makes it possible to exchange the data with the healthcare experts and digital platforms.
Considering the growing intelligence and connectivity of medical devices, cybersecurity, reliability and privacy of information become equally important. It becomes essential to ensure the privacy of patients' information and, at the same time, to ensure cybersecurity and reliability of connected medical devices. Therefore, medical technologies become one more field where AI, embedded systems, semiconductors, data analysis and cybersecurity meet.
AI, semiconductors, cybersecurity and renewable energy form the core technologies that are defining the next level of innovation. As far as AI is concerned, it is revolutionizing many fields with the help of automation and smarter machines while semiconductors and VLSI have made this development possible by providing computing capabilities. Therefore, it can easily be said that cybersecurity is vital to secure systems and devices while renewable energy will play a huge part in making the future sustainable.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and expert alone. The opinions and facts in this article do not represent the stand of Edexlive