Emerging Trends in Industrial Electronics: A Cross-Disciplinary View

Abstract

Industrial Electronics (IE) discipline includes a wide variety of technical areas devoted to the application of electronics and electrical sciences for the enhancement of industrial and manufacturing processes. It inherently acts as a key enabling technology for a diverse number of applications and includes latest developments in intelligent and computer control systems, robotics, factory communications and automation, flexible manufacturing, data acquisition and signal processing, vision systems, and power electronics, among others. This makes IE inherently multidisciplinary, and with many interdisciplinary synergies, playing a key role as an enabling technology in multiple domestic, biomedical, transportation, and industrial applications. This paper covers recent advances and future trends in those areas that support the cross disciplinary view of industrial electronics, including electronic systems on chip, standards, resilience and security matters, human factors and educational aspects. The main current state-of-the-art technologies and techniques are presented, and their future trends and challenges are discussed, focusing on the cross disciplinary view inherent to industrial electronics.

A Cross-Disciplinary Outlook of Directions and Challenges in Industrial Electronics

“…Starting by applying the cross-disciplinary intra-cluster methodology to a robotic walker with standing/sitting assistance capabilities [13], each cross-disciplinary technology contributes its respective solution to the problem at hand. The first cross-disciplinary technology of note is human factors, where its principles are applied impacting the design and application of the robotic walker, providing ease of use and comfort for the disabled or assisted elderly user.…”

“…While a large number of investigations have been carried out from the viewpoints of energy [7], [8], information and communication technologies (ICT) [9]- [11], and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) [12], few have been reported from cross-disciplinary technology integrating the fields of human factors, professional education, electronic systems on chip, technology ethics and society, and standards. To call for attention and discuss breakthroughs in this situation, we have presented two reviews from the cross-disciplinary viewpoint [13], [14].…”

“…From an Electronic Systems-on-Chip point of view, the constant technological evolution has reduced the size of individual components and greatly increased the capacity of individual silicon chips, while the economies of scale have allowed huge price reductions for many electronic devices of small to medium capacity. This has allowed system-onchip solutions to appear across many different fields and industries [13]. These solutions allow programmable logic solutions to be used in fields that previously could not benefit from those approaches.…”

Digital Electronic System-on-Chip Design: Methodologies, Tools, Evolution, and Trends

“…This article reinforces the message of the 'right recipe for smart' consisting of IoT enriched with AI. Real life examples highlighted in the paper include smart cities (e.g., Pittsburgh in the USA tackling snow, based on edge computing and AI-enriched IoT applications based on technology developed by Metro21), IoT technology making use of a network of nanosatellites (e.g., by French company SigFox), or contactless deliveries developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic [104]. Considering such complex applications of the electronic systems of the future, with challenges to satisfy power efficiency, flexibility, scalability, communication, and integration, the system-on-chip emerges as an ideal solution, enabling the designer to take advantage of the inherent parallelism offered by many algorithms and allowing the exploitation of hardware accelerators and dedicated peripherals in conjunction with CPU cores enabling ML/AI algorithms and connectivity, as shown in Figure 7 The authors of [90] highlight that a smart system is not just a collection of intelligent components, but a system of smart components designed to interact and cooperate.…”