“We don’t know how fast and what impact IoT will have. It will be gradual to begin with but, once it rolls out, the opportunities will be huge across every sector and market. There will hardly be any industry that won’t see innovation driven by the IoT,” he suggested. He went on to warn companies they would have to ‘dare to take a different view’ of their markets and technologies at a time of ‘digital disruption’.
“We are seeing disruption everywhere and companies will have to adapt and reposition themselves in the value chain with completely new business models.”
Van den Hove pointed to uber, Airbnb and Facebook as companies that had succeeded by taking a different view.
He also talked about the continuity of Moore’s Law at a time when it was getting more difficult to scale transistors to meet increasing performance requirements.
“There’s certainly a lot of talk concerning Moore’s Law and I, for one, believe it will continue. Scaling will have to continue if we want to deliver the enormous computing power the IoT calls for,” he said.
He continued, saying there were a number of solutions to secure Moore’s legacy and pointed to technologies such as FinFET and vertical and horizontal nanowires that he believed would support further scaling to 3nm over the next 10 years.
He also raised the prospect of EUV lithography entering production suggesting that: “Based on what I’ve seen recently, I am confident that it will enter manufacturing.”
He also said that 2D scaling would slow. That would be ‘unavoidable’, while stacking transistors and heterogeneous integration would help to drive the industry forward.
“We are going to see as ‘tsunami’ of smart connected devices entering our lives over the next decade,” he contended. “To facilitate this and accelerate it, we will need to see further innovation in terms of software and hardware, as well as more sophisticated sensors with both storage and communications technology.
“Such innovative products that serve tomorrow’s digital economy can only be developed through intense interaction between the worlds of software and hardware and there are infinite opportunities in domains such as sustainable healthcare, smart cities, smart manufacturing, smart finances, smart mobility and smart grids. In short, smart everything.
“Sensors will need to be cheap and smart and will require a lot of embedded computing power if they are to provide ‘relevant’ data into the network. Relevance is key,” he warned. “We need to transmit ‘wisdom’ and not just data, which means handling data in a meaningful way and providing a level of intelligence throughout the network.”
Technologies will need to be tested in the real world he argued, pointing to a ‘City of Things’ project in Antwerp which brings the entire ecosystem – including hardware, user groups and authorities – together to test new concepts.
Van den Hove also reminded attendees that imec was merging with digital research and incubation centre iMinds to create a high-tech research centre for the digital economy.
“The additions of iMinds’ flagship open innovation research model ICON, the iStart entrepreneurship programme and Living Labs will strengthen the capabilities and assets of imec as a research and development centre,” he said.
