Also known as “smart everything,” the Internet of Things (IoT) is grabbing headlines across the industry. As any great new technology, it comes wrapped in shiny paper that touts it as the solution for all things connected, be it the online tracking of the merchandise in a truck across the continent, the automatic sensing of the color of toast in the toaster, or measuring the number of steps walked in a day.
Looking beyond the hype and avoiding the scary potential of hackers taking over the fridge, this technology makes perfect sense for many uses.1 At the 2014 International CES, major industry players showed off their most recent toys (in some cases, literally) that benefit from this technology: wristbands and other wearables for medical, sports, and wellbeing applications; home appliances ranging from light control to the fridge; and even connected cars. While this market is still young, there is clear momentum driven by growing consumer adoption.
Although the IoT concept is loosely defined, it generally refers to applications working on the principle of distributed and remote collection of environmental data followed by limited local processing, then making the result available to the “world” via some sort of shared access to the Internet for further processing and aggregation. Applications in different domains include:
• Personal area wide: Wearable devices include sports and healthcare gear, smart watches, and glasses. Data is typically collected for processing in the smartphone or other personal equipment.
• Wide area: Sensors are distributed citywide for applications such as taxi or parking availability, public lighting, and information distribution. They use distributed data collection for central citywide processing and analysis. Inventory and transport tracking are other wide-area IoT applications.
• Local area: Data is processed for central home/office-wide processing including home appliances, energy and lighting control, and home heating and cooling. Industrial applications also fall in this category.
In all these applications, data is collected locally through various sensors. Some processing and data reduction are also performed, and the resulting information is then transmitted (Fig. 1). On the receiving side, data from several sources can be aggregated and further processed until meaningful information is generated and provided to the user through an additional service.
The device that performs these functions on the distributed side can be built around a system-on-chip (SoC) integrating a specifically designed applications processor for high-end applications or around a general-purpose MCU IC for low-end applications. In both cases, the device can be partitioned into a small number of functions: battery/power management, embedded flash (e-flash) memory, user interfaces (I/F) and other I/O, the wireless or wired (RF transceiver, TRX) communications interface, and the mission-critical sensor I/F (Fig. 2). Sensor devices are commonly divided into analog and digital categories.
source: http://electronicdesign.com/analog/define-analog-sensor-interfaces-iot-socs
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