Smart living

By 2030 the global population is expected to grow to more than eight billion people, with more than 60% living in cities. In addition, changing demographics of people living longer than 65 years will nearly double.

he challenge is to maintain people's quality of life while maintaining (or improving) a city's competitiveness, while also addressing the challenges of an ageing population, scarce resources and climate change. With smart systems in smart cities, we can do more with less.

The smart city is built on awareness and (some elements of) real-time control of all of the critical functions and infrastructure of the city. The citizens of the city and their 'smart things' are key actors in enabling the smart city to do more with less.

Today we are entering a new era in which the 'smart home' will continue to provide access to an ever-increasing range of entertainment, information and communication services while also playing a far greater role in many other aspects of our lives, including in health and wellness, domestic security and, particularly important, the need to use energy more efficiently, both to minimise energy costs and to contribute to the worldwide need to develop a sustainable energy strategy to address climate change.

Many factors are enabling this breakthrough in smart homes. One key factor is the very high level of performance that is possible with today's 'home gateways', which have evolved from the simple STB to highly sophisticated 'electronic front doors' that connect the home to a virtually unlimited pipeline of entertainment and information services with the ability to stream this multimedia content to multiple devices located anywhere in the home.

Smart home

Another major factor is the significant improvements that have been made in the price/power/performance trade-offs, in all the major semiconductor components such as sensors, microcontrollers, wireless transceivers and power transistors needed for smarter homes, and in the circuit topologies that can best exploit these advances. Moreover, the advances made by STMicroelectronics and other key technology providers have been complemented by the success of numerous consortia and partnerships in developing reliable, cost-effective international standards, such as the communications protocols used for smart metering and home automation.

Monitoring the smart home

In the future, smart homes will be more energy efficient and safer because of a network of monitors and image-sensor cameras distributed around the home. Self-powered nodes will easily be positioned around the home for tasks such as temperature, CO (carbon monoxide) or movement sensing, relaying data wirelessly to a PC or STB/home gateway. The data could then be communicated to a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet via a wireless router to enable monitoring and control.

ST has a range of solutions that can be used to create smart systems comprising sensing, processing, connectivity and energy management. This connectedness could enable, for example, garbage containers to automatically trigger collection when necessary, ultimately avoiding overfilled containers and also improving garbage fleet management.

Smart metering

Smart meters allow power generators to match consumption more efficiently and give users more control over their usage, providing real-time consumption, quality and outage information, and more flexible tariff schemes and billing.

Smart metering consists of an electronic power meter supplemented by, among other features, full remote control, diagnostics, power peak and consumption analysis, antitampering mechanisms, fault alert and time-variable tariffs. Using power line communication (PLC) technology to connect the meter to the service provider offers the feasibility for all of these features and opens the possibility for compatibility with future smart-grid protocols.

Smart meters include two main functions: a high-accuracy modulator for sensed current and voltage signals; and a dedicated metrology processor to calculate consumption. ST is a world leader in the smart-meter systems-on-chips that integrate these functions. In the next few years, smart metrology functions are also expected to be widely adopted in home appliances, air conditioning and power supply systems.

In a real-world example, smart metering company Meterlinq recently launched an open-standard smart-metering gateway built on ST's MCU and RF technologies. Meterlinq's remote reading and remote management system, based on ST's ultralow-power microcontrollers, handles the communication between smart meters in households and the neighbourhood data concentrator, which relays the information to the utility-provider control centre. This is the result of collaboration and ecosystem development between ST, gas meter manufacturers, system integrators, data management companies and utility companies.

Renewable energy sources

The most promising renewable energy source today is solar power. Maximising energy harvesting and conversion efficiency is critical to making solar energy competitive with fossil-fuel generation methods. Innovative technologies from ST in solar-power converters that improve efficiency include the proprietary MDmesh and STripFET VII DeepGATE power transistors, which ensure ultralow-loss performance; and silicon carbide (SiC) Schottky diodes for minimising switching losses and improving thermal performance in solar-power systems, where every fractional-percentage efficiency improvement is valuable.

In fact, ST's trials using the company's latest 1200 V silicon carbide diodes have shown a 2% increase in overall inverter yield, even when operating at high load and high frequency. Over the intended lifetime of inverters used in installations such as residential photovoltaic systems and high-power solar farms, this improvement can effectively save many megawatt-hours of valuable energy.

Smart buildings

The building network uses the smart meter as the link between the external network of energy sources and the internal demand. Optimised energy management, based on dynamic energy tariffs related to peak- and real-time power consumption, will result in valuable energy saving while minimising inconvenience to the final user. ST has a range of solutions that enable smarter building management. For example, power line communications products permit the use of existing wiring to connect smart systems in the building while intelligent programmable lighting solutions combined with sensors and RF connectivity enable optimised lighting management responsive to external lighting conditions and room occupancy.

Smart factory

With manufacturing consuming more than 40% of global energy, making factories as energy efficient as possible is a goal everywhere. Globally, multiple efforts are underway — all of them complementary. Meanwhile, industrial automation and manufacturing are going through the fourth phase of major change (after lean manufacturing in the '70s, outsourcing in the '90s and automation in the 2000s).

This phase, digitisation, is driven by four enablers, and ST has a hand in most of them. First are the advances in human-machine interaction, such as touch interfaces and augmented-reality systems, driven by progress in sensing technologies. Second is the rise in computing power and the ease and speed of connectivity, leading to an explosion in data volumes and the development of advanced robotics and 3D printing, among others. Finally, the emergence of large-scale analytics and business intelligence is opening new levels of understanding and productivity.

One key program is Industry 4.0. With its origins in Europe, it seeks to bring the advances of the computer revolution to the machines and processes developed in the industrial revolution. A similar undertaking is the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition, which had its origins in the United States.

As with the smart grid, these initiatives aim to bring intelligence and inter-communication to factory devices; they envision a day when, for example, factory machines could predict their own failures and automatically trigger pre-emptive maintenance, or when a supply chain can be so closely monitored that factory output would change automatically in response to changes in demand.

Smart mobility

According to new research from Gartner, by 2020 there will be a quarter of a billion connected vehicles on the road globally. Already, the number of connected cars coming onto the market is rising rapidly, with the likes of BMW, Ford, Mercedes and Tesla — in fact, most of the world's leading car manufacturers — already offering some form of wireless online connection in their latest vehicles.

Offering a simple and compelling upward-migration path from existing parts, ST's automotive MCUs enable improved vehicle performance and economy, with no compromises in security, while facilitating development with a powerful ecosystem and delivering savings by promoting hardware and software re-use. At the forefront of industrialising technologies that are essential to autonomous driving, ST is among the leaders in SoCs for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), which raise driving safety by detecting obstacles around the vehicle including other vehicles and pedestrians, as well as traffic signs and lane markings, to automatically operate brakes or control speed and following distance.

In April 2015, ST announced new members in its multicore microcontroller (MCU) family aimed at making cars safer. These devices are the first to be launched with ST's in-house 40 nm embedded Flash process. The automotive MCUs combine compliance with stringent automotive safety standards, encryption for security and increased memory size for the storage of vital programs and data, strengthening ST's product line of fault-tolerant microcontrollers for demanding applications throughout the car. These mission-critical applications include engine management, transmission, antilock braking, electric power steering, active suspension and ADAS.

MEMS sensors are inside many automotive products. Within ST's AMS product group, the Custom MEMS division develops the sensors that enable applications that help us navigate and make our cars safer. ST was also recently recognised by IHS, a global source of information and analytics, as the leader in automotive sensors for navigation and telematics, as well as the fastest growing automotive-sensor supplier worldwide.

Smart health care

Semiconductors have been used in medical equipment for over four decades but, until recently, this represented just a small part of the industrial electronics sector, mainly dedicated to equipment for use in hospitals and clinics. Today, thanks to the ever-increasing pervasion of microelectronics technology, the traditional medical electronics market has been transformed into the broader and fast-growing health and wellness market, in which people are taking more and more responsibility for their personal health and fitness.

ST is a manufacturing partner for some of the world's most important healthcare equipment manufacturers; a flexible development partner for companies with new ideas; a broad-range supplier able to offer complete hardware and software solutions for fast proof-of-concept, prototyping, industrialisation and commercialisation scenarios; and a major technology innovator in fields as diverse as microfluidics, ultralow-power design and motion sensing. The company has made a strong commitment to developing future technologies, products and partnerships that aim to help people live longer, safer and more secure lives.

*Xavier Baraton is currently heading the Strategic Business developments for Smart City and Consumer Robotics segments within the Greater China and South Asia region of STMicroelectronics. He is based in Hong Kong.