Breaking barriers: The reality

We all are liv­ing in a con­nec­ted world. We and everything sur­rounds us for that mat­ter is con­nec­ted or at the verge of con­nect­ing to the extent that we are wit­ness­ing a world with­in a world! Let’s dive into my naive way of look­ing at the real­ity as a nan­otech entre­pren­eur and how the oppor­tun­it­ies for nan­otech star­tups are emerging.

The Reality

In less than a gen­er­a­tion, we have been equipped with so many gad­gets that we have star­ted los­ing count on them. Tech­no­logy has mod­ern­ized us to the extent that we have become habitu­ated to many ges­tures so heav­ily that we con­sider many func­tions as gran­ted as breath­ing air! For example, we are so used to the smart­phone touch screen that some­times in our uncon­scious mind we try to touch as soon we find a dis­play, swipe our old com­puter mon­it­or or even TV for chan­ging a screen­shot or channel! 

The ori­gin­al hard­ware plat­forms man­u­fac­tur­ers like Intel, Sam­sung, Fujitsu, Qual­com, Cisco, Eric­sson, Nvidia etc. have enabled the monu­ment­al pro­gress of the soft­ware which in turn cre­ated a gigant­ic soft­ware industry. The young­est play­er of the game ARM have revo­lu­tion­ized the mobile devices through their ARM pro­cessors spe­cific­ally designed for hand­held mobile devices. Com­pany like Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Nokia and Sam­sung undoubtedly not only exploited the hard­ware to build soft­ware plat­form on top, but also have pushed dif­fer­ent tech­no­lo­gies through high­er demand on memory, pro­cessor clock speed, enable­ment from only talk to touch screen smart­phones and oth­er hand­held devices.

Such pro­gress­ive hard­ware plat­form has also had empowered a new breed of entre­pren­eurs cre­at­ing a bunch of highly suc­cess­ful soft­ware giants like Google, Face­book, PayP­al, Twit­ter, LinkedIn, You­tube, Airb­nb, Alibaba, Amazon, eBay, Skype, Spo­ti­fy, Viber, What­s­App, Uber, Snapchat and a lim­it­less list can con­tin­ue. Pro­lif­er­a­tion of hard­ware has also helped in adop­tion of well­ness track­ing, and vir­tu­al med­ic­al care solu­tions. Dra­mat­ic pro­gress in sensor man­u­fac­tur­ing in turn enabling self-driv­ing vehicles and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) with view, touch and more senses.

So far the exist­ing hard­ware plat­form was suf­fi­cient to wit­ness the pro­lif­er­a­tion of soft­ware industry. How­ever, as the soft­ware industry is pro­gress­ing well bey­ond its ima­gin­a­tions, and these soft­ware giants are able to con­nect bil­lions of people and gen­er­at­ing tril­lions of data out of the soft­ware eco­sys­tem lead­ing the sup­port­ing hard­ware to bleed and face tsunami of dif­fi­culties to coup up with in terms of speed, band­width, power man­age­ment and more.

Hence hard­ware tech­no­logy is unfor­tu­nately reach­ing to its lim­its or going out of steams or becom­ing more expens­ive instead of being economical.

Even bit­ter news, as it looks this data band­width demand will be fueled fur­ther up by the push of Inter­net of things (IoT), smart invent­ory, smart­city, Robot­ics, vir­tu­al real­ity (VR), aug­men­ted real­ity (AU), arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI), brain read, autonom­ous driv­ing, bio­mi­met­ic recog­ni­tion, human-machine (HI-AI) inter­ac­tions and finally per­haps the inter­net of things (IoE).

These applic­a­tions undoubtedly cre­at­ing tre­mend­ous stress on the exist­ing hard­ware plat­form not only to be largely revamped but also to be com­ple­men­ted with a lot of /​quoutiny little sensors, wire­less mod­ules and self-sus­tain­ing power management.

There­fore, with no sur­prise, we wit­ness a shift in hard­ware plat­form mov­ing from gen­er­al pur­pose to applic­a­tion spe­cif­ic hard­ware accel­er­a­tion. A per­fect example of how the soft­ware industry today is shap­ing the future of hard­ware industry is the intro­duc­tion and imple­ment­a­tion of tensor pro­cessing unit (TPU) . Fas­cin­at­ing enough, the TPU is not developed by the world largest hard­ware foundry, but by the largest soft­ware industry Google! The developed TPU legit­im­ately per­forms oper­a­tions > 15× faster than exist­ing cent­ral pro­cessing unit (CPU) or graph­ics pro­cessing unit (GPU) in the mar­ket.¹

Great soft­ware shines even bright­er with great hard­ware under­neath it

Norm Jouppi, Google

Indeed, Google is tak­ing the lead in hard­ware accel­er­a­tions by devel­op­ing its pro­pri­et­ary tensor pro­cessing units (TPU), sys­tem on a chip (SoC) etc.! Apple, repeatedly dis­ap­point­ing hard­ware chip design com­pan­ies by chan­ging their mod­el from out­sourced towards in-house hard­ware design.² The oth­er soft­ware giants will soon join the club.

Obvi­ously it is no longer enough to col­lect & store gar­gan­tu­an amount of data to the cloud, the sys­tem need to be intel­li­gent enough to be able to ana­lyze and gen­er­ate pat­terns, trends, prob­ab­il­ity etc. to be able to nav­ig­ate real time activ­it­ies or per­haps to mon­et­ize from the big data. Such scheme how­ever requires soph­ist­ic­ated algorithm and a lot of com­put­ing power to be quick enough to help with data crunch­ing, demands quick ana­lys­is and turn­ing data into some kind of intel­li­gence so that real time decision mak­ing can be made by AI!

Com­pan­ies like Wall­mart would like to equip their shops with a lot of sensors all around to enable IoT inspired cus­tom­er ser­vices.³ Such ginorm­ous imple­ment­a­tion undoubtedly will boost cus­tom­er sat­is­fac­tion as well as will be excel­lent trig­ger for waste management.

How­ever, to add some oil to the fire, most of such hard­ware need to become tiny, slick, self-powered/­power effi­cient, eco­nom­ic­al, sus­tain­able and envir­on­ment­ally friendly etc. etc. etc. There­fore, the need for mini­atur­iz­a­tion of hard­ware, nan­o­tech­no­logy and nan­o­ma­ter­i­als come into play.

What makes the situ­ation for the nan­otech star­tups so com­pel­ling for hard­ware plat­form makers is that VR, AI, IoT, smart invent­ory, machine learn­ing oppor­tun­ity is unfold­ing at a time when the mar­ket for tra­di­tion­al tech­no­logy is either flat­ten­ing or run­ning out of steams to sup­port the mar­ket demand in data acquis­i­tion and ana­lys­is. We are undoubtedly wit­ness­ing an inflec­tion point for the most developed and exploited CMOS tech­no­logy lead­ing to the col­lapse of dec­ades of stand­ard ITRS roadmap (≈ a paradigm shift ≈ any tech­no­logy adop­tion can hap­pen scen­ario ≈ hard­ware accel­er­a­tion). There­fore, oppor­tun­it­ies emerge now for the nan­o­ma­ter­i­als startups.

Next article

In the next and final art­icle my dive will be on ‘the future’ where we may find the inva­sion of nan­otech and nan­o­ma­ter­i­als to impact in revamp­ing future of hard­ware and hence will dra­mat­ic­ally help to unleash the power of inter­net of everything!

1. Source: Google says its cus­tom machine learn­ing chips are often 15–30x faster than GPUs and CPUs, Tech­Crunch, April 5, 2015 ↩︎
2. Apple will design its own power man­age­ment chips, says report, The Verge, Novem­ber 30, 2017 ↩︎
3. Source: Wal­mart Calls for Sub-$1 IoT Sensor, EETimes, Decem­ber 4, 2017 ↩︎