In recent years connected devices have sky rocketed in number. The exponential increases are such that by 2020, as we move towards the IoT era, the estimated number is expected to reach a staggering 25-50 billion device. This dramatic increase in the number of devices is significantly impacting the semiconductor landscape. The IoT era has not only driven the need for more connected devices but concurrently is driving the need for better networks and faster access to support these devices. From smart phones to wearable devices to automotive, medical, industrial devices connected home and corporate networks, as well as base stations and data centers, devices with significant semiconductor content are propelling growth in the semiconductor business. Fundamentally this has also lead to an expansion in the number of opportunities a company can address.

In the face of this tremendous growth, the industry faces a couple of interesting challenges, including the consolidation of the customer base on the consumer device side (smartphones and TVs being an example), and on the infrastructure side, the fact that a handful of select customers are responsible for driving significant volumes. Another challenge is that interconnected devices such as smartphones require both transactional security as well as privacy security, and increasingly networks need to provide additional protection from varied forms of cyber attacks as the volume and traffic content through them increases.

'Standardization' is Imperative for growth in connected devices. Push towards scalable and flexible networks

An ideally connected world such as a smart home with a lot of connected devices requires standardized protocol for communications. A standardized method is the only route that helps realize systematic communications and control of different devices to make them connect to each other. These are missing in some cases because these standards take a fair amount of time to establish. For example in the wireless charging area, until recently when there was a merger of the Alliance for Wireless Power and the Power Matters Alliance, there were 3 standards groups providing protocols for wirelessly charging connected devices. While such standards for communications between devices in certain areas are well defined, they are still evolving when it comes to the connected home. The need to eventually adopt standardized communication protocols is imperative for users, as well as for component makers, in this fast-changing landscape. One of the other challenges ahead of us is the flexibility and scalability of networks. As the volume of data and video processed on networks increases, scalability and flexibility take center stage. The amount of information processed through networks is increasing as are the patterns of traffic being handled by them, and increasingly the demand on the networks is to adapt to the pattern of traffic flowing through them and be both software configurable as well as scalable.

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