Commentary Serge Leef

Convergence of Silicon, Sensors, Mobility, and Cloud as Driving Forces in System Design Innovation   Serge Leef   Mentor Graphics   Email: serge_leef@mentor.com

Concurrent emergence of several technologies set the stage for a very dynamic landscape of opportunities in System Design. Advances in silicon technology enabled increasingly more compact and power-efficient, internet connected mobile devices. These communication and computing devices have spread out through most of the population of the planet, giving nearly everyone direct or indirect access to variety of local and remote applications. In turn, server farms formed a world-wide resource with infinite storage and compute capacity.

Collectively referred to as Cloud these farms can host huge, dynamically updated data-bases containing everything from individual shopper profiles to medical records. Additionally, wireless sensors are becoming increasingly common: these devices collect real-time data and upload it to the Cloud, making it available for interpretation and processing. When the wireless sensors are considered in a particular application domain, exciting possibilities become apparent. For example, in preventative health care application space, wireless sensors can collect variety of live data streams (weight, glucose level, pulse rate, blood pressure, cardiac activity, caloric burn and intake, exercise, etc) about the subject and aggregate these data on the Cloud along with patient`s historical medical records and possibly the decoded Genome.

Cloud-based software systems could then dynamically analyze incoming data in conjunction with statically available data, assess patient state, transmit status data to the patient`s mobile device and alert the Physician if the diagnostic interpretation warrants medical intervention. This is just one example where these technologies can be deployed in tandem to address a readily identifiable and monetizable opportunity. There are endless examples of applications spaces that can be similarly explored.

Presentations of Serge Leef at RUSTEC workshops in Arizona:

International R&D in EDA - Perennial Search for Talent and Ideas

Success factors for value creation in the era of technology convergence

Success factors in leadership of high tech organizations