---
title: "Breaking barriers: The reality"
canonical_url: "https://www.smoltek.com/breaking-barriers-the-reality/1227/"
date: 2017-12-13
author: "Fredrik Liljeberg"
featured_image: "https://www.smoltek.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/yz1kx79vvzi-jpg.webp"
categories:
  - name: "IR Blog Posts"
    url: "https://www.smoltek.com/category/ir-blog-posts.md"
---

# Breaking barriers: The reality

We all are liv­ing in a con­nect­ed world. We and every­thing sur­rounds us for that mat­ter is con­nect­ed or at the verge of con­nect­ing to the extent that we are wit­ness­ing a world with­in a world! Let’s dive into my naive way of look­ing at the real­i­ty as a nan­otech entre­pre­neur and how the oppor­tu­ni­ties for nan­otech star­tups are emerging.

## [](https://www.smoltek.com#the-reality)The Reality

In less than a gen­er­a­tion, we have been equipped with so many gad­gets that we have start­ed los­ing count on them. Tech­nol­o­gy has mod­ern­ized us to the extent that we have become habit­u­at­ed to many ges­tures so heav­i­ly that we con­sid­er many func­tions as grant­ed as breath­ing air! For exam­ple, we are so used to the smart­phone touch screen that some­times in our uncon­scious mind we try to touch as soon we find a dis­play, swipe our old com­put­er mon­i­tor or even TV for chang­ing a screen­shot or channel! 

The orig­i­nal hard­ware plat­forms man­u­fac­tur­ers like [Intel](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/homepage.html), [Sam­sung](https://news.samsung.com/global/category/products/semiconductors), [Fujit­su](https://www.fujitsu.com/global/), [Qual­com](https://www.qualcomm.com/home), [Cis­co](https://www.cisco.com/), [Eric­s­son](https://www.ericsson.com/en), [Nvidia](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/) etc. have enabled the mon­u­men­tal progress of the soft­ware which in turn cre­at­ed a gigan­tic soft­ware indus­try. The youngest play­er of the game [ARM](https://www.arm.com/) have rev­o­lu­tion­ized the mobile devices through their ARM proces­sors specif­i­cal­ly designed for hand­held mobile devices. Com­pa­ny like [Microsoft](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/about), [Ora­cle](https://www.oracle.com/corporate/), [Apple](https://www.apple.com/business/), [Nokia](https://www.nokia.com/about-us/) and Sam­sung undoubt­ed­ly not only exploit­ed the hard­ware to build soft­ware plat­form on top, but also have pushed dif­fer­ent tech­nolo­gies through high­er demand on mem­o­ry, proces­sor clock speed, enable­ment from only talk to touch screen smart­phones and oth­er hand­held devices.

![](https://www.smoltek.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/from-single-transistor-to-augmented-reality-600x429.png)

From sin­gle tran­sis­tor to aug­ment­ed reality

Such pro­gres­sive hard­ware plat­form has also had empow­ered a new breed of entre­pre­neurs cre­at­ing a bunch of high­ly suc­cess­ful soft­ware giants like [Google](https://about.google/), [Face­book](https://www.facebook.com/pg/facebook/about/), [Pay­Pal](https://www.paypal.com/bt/webapps/mpp/about), [Twit­ter](https://about.twitter.com/en), [Linke](https://news.linkedin.com/about-us)[d](https://news.linkedin.com/about-us)[In](https://news.linkedin.com/about-us), [Youtube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#Company_history), [Airbnb](https://news.airbnb.com/about-us/), [Aliba­ba](https://activities.alibaba.com/alibaba/following-about-alibaba.php?spm=a2700.8293689.0.0.664414beCCIntj&tracelog=footer_alibaba), [Ama­zon](https://www.aboutamazon.com), [eBay](https://www.ebayinc.com), [Sk](https://www.skype.com/en/about/)[y](https://www.skype.com/en/about/)[pe](https://www.skype.com/en/about/), [Spo­ti­fy](https://support.spotify.com/sk-sk/article/what-is-spotify/), [Viber](https://www.viber.com/en/about/), [What­sApp](https://www.whatsapp.com/about/), [Uber](https://www.uber.com/en-IN/about/), [Snapchat](https://support.snapchat.com/en-US/a/our-story) and a lim­it­less list can con­tin­ue. Pro­lif­er­a­tion of hard­ware has also helped in adop­tion of well­ness track­ing, and vir­tu­al med­ical care solu­tions. Dra­mat­ic progress in sen­sor man­u­fac­tur­ing in turn enabling self-dri­ving vehi­cles and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence ([AI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence)) with view, touch and more senses.

![](https://www.smoltek.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/global-use-of-data-2017-600x365.png)

Glob­al use of data 2017.

So far the exist­ing hard­ware plat­form was suf­fi­cient to wit­ness the pro­lif­er­a­tion of soft­ware indus­try. How­ev­er, as the soft­ware indus­try is pro­gress­ing well beyond its imag­i­na­tions, and these soft­ware giants are able to con­nect bil­lions of peo­ple and gen­er­at­ing tril­lions of data out of the soft­ware ecosys­tem lead­ing the sup­port­ing hard­ware to bleed and face tsuna­mi of dif­fi­cul­ties to coup up with in terms of speed, band­width, pow­er man­age­ment and more.

Hence hard­ware tech­nol­o­gy is unfor­tu­nate­ly reach­ing to its lim­its or going out of steams or becom­ing more expen­sive instead of being economical.

Even bit­ter news, as it looks this data band­width demand will be fueled fur­ther up by the push of Inter­net of things (IoT), smart inven­to­ry, smartc­i­ty, Robot­ics, vir­tu­al real­i­ty (VR), aug­ment­ed real­i­ty (AU), arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI), brain read, autonomous dri­ving, bio­mimet­ic recog­ni­tion, human-machine (HI-AI) inter­ac­tions and final­ly per­haps the inter­net of things (IoE).

These appli­ca­tions undoubt­ed­ly cre­at­ing tremen­dous stress on the exist­ing hard­ware plat­form not only to be large­ly revamped but also to be com­ple­ment­ed with a lot of /​quoutiny lit­tle sen­sors, wire­less mod­ules and self-sus­tain­ing pow­er management.

There­fore, with no sur­prise, we wit­ness a shift in hard­ware plat­form mov­ing from gen­er­al pur­pose to appli­ca­tion spe­cif­ic hard­ware accel­er­a­tion. A per­fect exam­ple of how the soft­ware indus­try today is shap­ing the future of hard­ware indus­try is the intro­duc­tion and imple­men­ta­tion of ten­sor pro­cess­ing unit (TPU) . Fas­ci­nat­ing enough, the TPU is not devel­oped by the world largest hard­ware foundry, but by the largest soft­ware indus­try Google! The devel­oped TPU legit­i­mate­ly per­forms oper­a­tions > 15× faster than exist­ing cen­tral pro­cess­ing unit (CPU) or graph­ics pro­cess­ing unit (GPU) in the mar­ket.[1](https://www.smoltek.com#9a112c65-58f7-415d-9d5c-00e671624515)

> Great soft­ware shines even brighter with great hard­ware under­neath it
> 
> Norm Joup­pi, Google

Indeed, Google is tak­ing the lead in hard­ware accel­er­a­tions by devel­op­ing its pro­pri­etary ten­sor pro­cess­ing units (TPU), sys­tem on a chip (SoC) etc.! Apple, repeat­ed­ly dis­ap­point­ing hard­ware chip design com­pa­nies by chang­ing their mod­el from out­sourced towards in-house hard­ware design.[2](https://www.smoltek.com#4e3ee8e8-f8dd-4002-b4b7-c547cb2981d5) The oth­er soft­ware giants will soon join the club.

![](https://www.smoltek.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/google-tensor-processing-unit-600x400.webp)

Ten­sor pro­cess­ing unit from Google

Obvi­ous­ly it is no longer enough to col­lect & store gar­gan­tu­an amount of data to the cloud, the sys­tem need to be intel­li­gent enough to be able to ana­lyze and gen­er­ate pat­terns, trends, prob­a­bil­i­ty etc. to be able to nav­i­gate real time activ­i­ties or per­haps to mon­e­tize from the big data. Such scheme how­ev­er requires sophis­ti­cat­ed algo­rithm and a lot of com­put­ing pow­er to be quick enough to help with data crunch­ing, demands quick analy­sis and turn­ing data into some kind of intel­li­gence so that real time deci­sion mak­ing can be made by AI!

Com­pa­nies like [Wall­mart](https://www.walmart.com/) would like to equip their shops with a lot of sen­sors all around to enable IoT inspired cus­tomer ser­vices.[3](https://www.smoltek.com#64a69863-248b-46ab-894d-23349a930773) Such ginor­mous imple­men­ta­tion undoubt­ed­ly will boost cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion as well as will be excel­lent trig­ger for waste management.

How­ev­er, to add some oil to the fire, most of such hard­ware need to become tiny, slick, self-pow­ered/pow­er effi­cient, eco­nom­i­cal, sus­tain­able and envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly etc. etc. etc. *There­fore*, the need for minia­tur­iza­tion of hard­ware, nan­otech­nol­o­gy and nano­ma­te­ri­als come into play.

What makes the sit­u­a­tion for the nan­otech star­tups so com­pelling for hard­ware plat­form mak­ers is that VR, AI, IoT, smart inven­to­ry, machine learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty is unfold­ing at a time when the mar­ket for tra­di­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy is either flat­ten­ing or run­ning out of steams to sup­port the mar­ket demand in data acqui­si­tion and analy­sis. We are undoubt­ed­ly wit­ness­ing an inflec­tion point for the most devel­oped and exploit­ed CMOS tech­nol­o­gy lead­ing to the col­lapse of decades of stan­dard ITRS roadmap (≈ a par­a­digm shift ≈ any tech­nol­o­gy adop­tion can hap­pen sce­nario ≈ hard­ware accel­er­a­tion). There­fore, oppor­tu­ni­ties emerge *now* for the nano­ma­te­ri­als startups.

## [](https://www.smoltek.com#next-article)Next article

In the next and final arti­cle ([Break­ing Bar­ri­ers, part III: The Future](https://www.smoltek.com/breaking-barriers-the-future/1255/)) my dive will be on ‘the future’ where we may find the inva­sion of nan­otech and nano­ma­te­ri­als to impact in revamp­ing future of hard­ware and hence will dra­mat­i­cal­ly help to unleash the pow­er of inter­net of everything!

* * *

ICYMI: The first arti­cle in the series: [Break­ing Bar­ri­ers, part I: The Hype](https://www.smoltek.com/breaking-barriers-the-hype/1220/)