Next up in our series is Simon Bloch’s forecast for 2014. Simon is Sr. Director of Samsung Electronics R&D, in mobile consumer wireless devices.
“The future of electronics is looking bright! Market forecasters predict growth in literally every category of electronic markets ranging from smart mobile and wearable devices, appliances and sensors connected to a network of Internet of Everything to smart connected cars and cities.
In today’s electronics products, sophisticated hardware is becoming insufficient for product success. Many layers of stacked software control the underlying hardware and determine a product’s competitiveness via functionality, performance, power and cost. And while there is always going to be a need to create new semiconductor components and IC companies will need EDA tools, EDA vendors need to expand the view of Electronics and treat software stack as an integrated part of EDA.
There are many opportunities to come up with products in the software stack space around Linux/Android operating systems and in the area of hardware virtualization. Just last month, CyanogenMod, a company that provides Android based software widely used in the mobile industry, secured $23 million in funding from top tier VCs. CyanogenMod is a software stack product and contains many features not found in Google versions of the operating system.
