Beyond the Cloud Key Technologies and Challenges

There are multiple market directions that are giving clear indications of strong need for semiconductors that can impact the way we live in the foreseeable future. These many elements of growth are driven by energy conservation and a compelling need to engage with an intelligent ambient with an immersive multimedia experience enabled by an ubiquitous connection to the cloud. The cloud is becoming the engine that enables our increasingly digital world to provide us with the services we expect. It provides a centralized resource of computation and storage that we access through the mobile access gateway such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops. As we look to the future, the technologies beyond the cloud will drive our ability to create an intelligent environment that can anticipate and adopt to our needs. These technologies will enable distributed intelligence and autonomous systems to provide a network of electronics that will optimize our energy usage, enhance our safety and security, improve our transportation and give us better control of our wellness and personal health. The technologies required by these trillions of devices that will be beyond the cloud are low power electronics for performance computation, communications systems, sensors, and energy resourcing and management. The challenge is that we will need orders of magnitude improvements in power, performance, interconnect and cost to make this possible. This presentation will look at the technologies that will be needed to bring about the new generation of electronic applications beyond the cloud.

Dr. Ajith Amerasekera is a TI Fellow with TI's Kilby Labs. He received his PhD in 1986 and started working with Philips Research Labs, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, on the first submicron semiconductor development. In 1991, he joined Texas Instruments, Dallas, working in the VLSI Design Labs on circuit and device modeling of high current effects in devices and circuits. Since 1999, he has been working on circuit design and IP development in technologies from 250nm to 32nm working on products including digital signal processors, network routers, wireless infrastructure, and mobile platforms, that form the core of the information technology environment around us. Ajith is an IEEE Fellow and has 30 issued patents, published 4 books and over 100 papers, and given many invited talks at major conferences and forums. He has been an editor of the Journal of Solid State Circuits, and on a number of technical program committees for international conferences, most recently the General Chairman for the 2012 VLSI Symposium on Circuits and Technical Program Chairman for the 2012 International Symposium on Low Power Electronic Design.