Visiting expert predicts digital ubiquity
Visiting expert predicts digital ubiquity
Sixty-four bit computers on every desktop, the return of supercomputing, an explosion in digital imagery, and increased use of computer simulation to replace physical prototypes, are all on the fast approaching horizon, according to visiting US engineering technology expert, Dr Stuart McGarrity.
Speaking in Melbourne last Friday, Dr McGarrity - who was visiting Australia in his capacity as product manager with mathematical and scientific software company, The MathWorks, to help launch the company’s latest releases, Matlab 7 and Simulink - predicted digital imagery would soon be in “everything”.
“That means cars are going to be using digital imagery. Aircraft and missiles already are. In many cases it is a cheaper, faster, and simpler substitute for radar.
“Predictions tell us there will be 100 million digital cameras sold next year and 300 million telephones with digital cameras sold.
“It is going be important to process, compress and use data in a fast and efficient way and that means very large datasets.”
Dr McGarrity also predicted rapid growth in simulation, saying it will be quicker, easier and simpler to use a computer to work out how humans will use a piece of equipment, than by building a prototype.
“With shorter product life cycles and current development costs we will see greater use of simulation in engineering design. That ranges from traditional areas like aerospace to new areas like home appliances, biological systems, and even human-machine interactions.
“Every organisation that is designing systems has discovered that you can save 20, 30, 50, 70 percent of your time and energy if you do more simulation and fewer physical prototypes.
“We need to provide a simulation capability that can cover multiple dimensions of a problem, not only the control or the signal dimension but also the interaction of those two, the physical effects and the effects around it.”
Also on the horizon, predicts Dr McGarrity, is the crossover of engineering and biology.
“There is going to be a huge introduction of engineering practice into the biosciences in the next 10 to 15 years.
“Engineering groups are already looking at the possibility of using strands of DNA with its natural folding tendencies to design and build circuits.
“There is a huge potential here for cross fertilisation of ideas - engineering solutions in the sciences and biological solutions in engineering.”
Dr McGarrity also discussed the ongoing evolution of embedded system development.
“There is software in everything, there are microprocessors in everything. We’re approaching a level of near nine billion embedded microprocessors being shipped each year, sitting inside products. That is more microprocessors than human beings on earth.
“These electronic gadgets have turned out to be useful in almost anything that is built; they are finding their way not only into cars but into washing machines, MP3 players, and other consumer products, and of course phone systems and aircraft and spacecraft are loaded with them.
“That also means that every single one of these products is going to be getting shipped with maybe a million lines of code. The ability of engineering teams to keep up with the software development is going to be really strained.”
Dr McGarrity said a second trend in embedded systems is the continued search for high-end, high performance hardware to increase the throughput of these very high-end applications, whether it is radar or video or image processing.
“At the same time they are becoming standardised, there are also some emerging architectures that are really a combination of hardware, HDL and software all blended together.
“Our ability to address the opportunity presented by these architectures is going to depend on the merging of software design and hardware design tools. There really isn’t a field of control system design or DSP system design or image system design anymore. They are all merging together.
“The next generation of products such as the Airbus A380, next-generation cars with collision avoidance systems and rollover protection system or new generation phones with their Internet connections, all have a blend of visual, signal and control processing.
“The ability to design a system that incorporates all of those, and can be implemented in a combination of hardware and software, is where the embedded world is going.”
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