For hundreds of years, engineers have built sensors into systems and devices to gather information from the physical world. Sensors have done much to automate systems, make the world smarter and advance our way of life, but only recently have consumers engaged with sensor information in personal ways.

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The sensor industry is growing at a very healthy pace. “The IoT (Internet of Things) is impacting growth across many market sectors, including sensors, where the number of units produced and employed will exceed 35 billion units by 2018,” according to Semico Research & Consulting Group. Vendors are shipping discrete sensors, as well as combo sensors that incorporate more than one function.

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As we evaluate trends that will influence our work in 2016 and beyond, I’d like to suggest that designers explore the many new opportunities that embedded camera technologies will bring to cars and drones.

We’re already accustomed to cameras everywhere, in security and other fixed applications, and cameras are mainstream in mobile. In fact, society embraced cameras phones so quickly that the mobile industry has evolved away from its original voice context to become an industry characterized, in large part, by mobile visual communications. Cars and drones are the next logical applications for cameras, and the use cases are already established and gaining momentum. The trend will introduce a new field of innovation and opportunity that I call “cameras in motion.”

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Wireless has become so commonplace we now take it for granted. It is essential not only for phones, but it is also unleashing the new universe of connected devices known as the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT has taken off and will grow exponentially in the next few years. It is certain to bring embedded connectivity to all types of equipment and products used in industries, business, and society, and it is already opening up compelling new product categories, such as smart wearables.

You'd think that with ubiquity a wireless product developer's work would become routine. But, in fact, the opposite is the case. As we enter the era of IoT and build smaller and smarter connected devices, the task of meeting a design's most fundamental needs becomes more challenging. The traditional must-have characteristics for successful devices—high performance, low power and low electromagnetic interference (EMI)—are more important than ever.

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Everybody loves wireless: It's the main impetus driving technology innovation and social and business communications today, and it will continue to drive innovation for years to come. Yet an under-appreciated reality is that wireless is very dependent on wired connections. In fact, wireless is only as good as the wires that support it.

In a device like a smartphone, for example, a full ecosystem of internal wiring standards interconnects a couple dozen components, from the modem and application processor to the microphone, speaker, sensors and other peripherals. In this article I'll describe these wired connections and the interfaces and architectures that are used to build mobile and mobile-influenced devices. I'll also point out some key challenges engineers face when doing this work.

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