By Mike Thompson

Outgrowing technology—or at least the capabilities of technology—has always been a fundamental driver of change in the semiconductor industry.

The early PCs worked great for word processing, but as soon as graphics were introduced they were suddenly underpowered, underequipped to push through the mammoth graphics files and unable to store the larger files. Likewise, the early digital cameras were rudimentary (but very expensive) toys. At the time they were introduced, photojournalists swore they would never replace film.

We’ve come a long way since then. It’s now possible to record videos on digital cameras. Think about this compared to the beginning of the last decade when two PCs sitting next to each other in an office couldn’t trade information. Connectivity has become so rich that a USB cable can connect a PC to a camera, MP3 player, microphone, speakers and even cell phones.

These kinds of technological advancements always create bottlenecks, though. The speed needed to provide this level of integration has gone up, and the power budget within which these devices must live has gone down. There are more devices to control, finer control being demanded for each device, and much more performance needed to make it all work. That means the old way of doing things—using an 8-bit or 16-bit embedded microcontroller is no longer sufficient.

That should help explain much of the activity that has been under way in this part of the market lately. After years of saying that 8-bit and 16-bit microcontrollers are good enough, the market is now moving toward 32-bit embedded processors and deeply embedded functionality that can control everything from multiple power domains to the kind of switching that makes devices run faster with far more functionality.

You can expect to see even more activity in this part of the market over the next several years as configurability of function, instruction sets and an extremely small footprint become far more important to systems engineers and end users soak up the leaps in functionality they’ve come to expect.