The COMPUTEX 2023 Keynote series continued on Wednesday with a presentation by Rafael Sotomayor, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Secure Connected Edge for NXP Semiconductors. Sotomayor spoke about managing complexity, a topic that has come to be of paramount importance for industry leaders today.
Sotomayor began by observing that “the complexity of edge devices is increasing at a faster rate than ever,” which means that new possibilities are constantly appearing on the horizon – but so are new problems to be solved.
It is no longer enough for enterprises to address only the minimum levels of complexity necessary to develop and build products, or those which simply allow companies to differentiate themselves from the competition.
Instead, the importance of unforeseen complexities – disruptions, unpredictable events, and black swans – has risen to the fore, as recently illustrated by pandemics, supply chain issues, security vulnerabilities, and geopolitical issues.
That means that solving complexity today means thinking beyond the chip.
The approach to complexity adopted by NXP has been to focus upon the use case and its evolution, and to launch into driving, shaping, and transforming entire ecosystems from there.
By way of example, Sotomayor told the audience in Taipei that NXP is partnering with two powerful local players, Taiwan Semiconductor and Foxconn, to develop processors which “shape the ecosystem” and “influence the future architecture” of the automotive industry.
Two other areas where use cases will be key to driving ecosystem development are smart factories and smart homes.
Today’s manufacturing industries pose problems for operational efficiency, energy efficiency, and waste reduction – problems which could be solved with flexible automation on factory floors.
To that end, NXP has developed a suite of products, including its i.MXRT1180 and MCX microcontrollers, eIQ machine learning environment, and N-AFE analog front end units, to build an industrial ecosystem optimized for the smart factory. “If you’re in industrial, and you’re in smart factories,” Sotomayor told the audience, “you need to be talking to NXP.”
Despite the proliferation and increasing uptake of smart devices in all aspects of everyday life, we have yet to achieve truly smart homes.
The true use case here, Sotomayor explained, is not “connected” homes, but “autonomous” homes in which these devices are able to communicate and interface with each other in a shared language.
NXP is responding by building compatibility with Matter, the open-source connectivity standard developed by a group of companies including Google, Apple, and Amazon, directly into its MCUs, and thereby investing in the ecosystem it wants to see in future.
Sotomayor closed by discussing how complexity constantly returns as these different ecosystems begin to converge with one another, for example as smart automotives bridge with mobile devices and IoT-enabled products in the home to create an even richer – and more complex – network.
