Engineering, like life, is all about compromises.
您可能希望那辆新跑车,但是如何证明费用如何?它是否有足够的空间来带孩子们到足球实践?
Similarly, in any electronics system design, you need to balance multiple factors, and make trade-offs. You can’t have everything.
交换(大小,重量和力量)是航空航天和国防世界更熟悉的术语,但是思考任何设计中固有的妥协的好方法。您如何平衡对更紧凑的产品的愿望,需要在许多应用中降低功耗?雷竞技安卓下载雷电竞官网登录
当然,尺寸和重量链接。较小的组件可能会使用较少的功率,所以问题在哪里?
The issue is we can’t just consider the SWaP factors in isolation. The cost adds an extra dimension, so you’ll hear people talking about SWaP-C. And you need to think about performance and functionality.
Moore’s Law to the Rescue
Moore的法律使电子产品能够保持相对恒定的互换,同时增加新功能,增加性能(通常急剧),并满足同比价格下降的预期。或者,设计人员可以优先考虑一个方面 - 例如,使产品更小或添加更多功能。雷电竞官网登录
In the consumer world, just look at the smartphone: a Radio Shackadvert从1991年列出了15个小工具,其中13个现在被手机取代。全产品类别已托运到历史:现在购买数码相机或独立坐立的卫星纳米?
In the industrial world, the change is maybe less spectacular, but no less significant. Microprocessors have become low-cost, low-power items, and ICs get ever more integrated.
For analog parts,Moore’s法律已经为芯片(SOC)上的混合信号系统启用了高水平的集成。但模拟世界的物理意味着还需要另一个创新,例如,新的架构来处理信号对噪声的减少,因为几何形状具有缩小和电源电压降低。
IIoT Changes the Game
For the Internet of Things (IoT), and specifically, the industrial IoT, how do the changes in SWaP, cost, performance, and functionality match customer demands?
IIOT通过多种方式是期望的一步变化。
But there will be a massive increase in the number of devices deployed (revenues对于IIOR预测,2018年的预测为17.7%,达到近360亿美元),其中许多是传感器和执行器,但需要局部加工能力。
其中许多将在便携式应用中,因此交换很重要 - 功率通常来自电池甚至能雷竞技安卓下载量收集。使用这么多设备,单位成本将更重要。
Are the familiar price/performance and SWaP improvements even sustainable for the IIoT?
与定制ICS满足IIOT挑战
如果您使用标准零件设计,您可能会觉得妥协太多了。您必须选择最接近满足您需求的零件,并且只接受他们跌倒的地方 - 或者比您想要的更大,昂贵或更大的电力饥饿。
There is always more than one way to solve a problem, and an increasingly popular alternative is to use custom ICs – which can provide exactly the functionality needed in one, highly-integrated mixed signal ASIC. This helps keep power consumption down and reduce system size and weight.
在成本方面,不可避免地与定制IC进行一次性投资,通过较低的材料(BOM)平衡。但回收期比你想象的回收期短 - 在S3半导体中,我们发现它通常为一到两年,即使是相当低的卷。
The more devices, the better the numbers work – so high-volume IIoT applications benefit particularly well from the economics of custom semiconductors.
The IIoT is an inflection point in terms of functionality needed, as well as creating tough requirements for cost, power consumption, size, and weight.
To meet these challenges, and to square the SWaP-C circle, it’s always worth considering custom ASICs at the start of a new project.