Feature: Electronics
E
Electronics companies looking to the future
By Norio Nakajima, President, Murata Figure 1: The digital twin concept
verything around us is constantly changing, including our daily way of life, businesses and society. Ten to twenty years from now may appear far off, but concepts and technologies already exist that give us a glimpse into the future. Te Japanese government has a concept in sight called “Society
5.0” that will combine our real world – where we spend our daily lives, work and engage with society – with the virtual one – where digital information is collected and processed to produce greater value. Te first steps are already here: communications technologies
are connecting devices to the Internet and one another. Today we have 5G, but in 2030 we’ll have terahertz-wave communications, for faster and wider-bandwidth communication at frequencies of up to 1THz. With advanced communications systems, the real and virtual worlds will become ever more conjoined, with a digital model of reality existing in parallel, the so-called “digital twin”; see Figure 1. Terahertz-wave communications will most likely be part of
6G communications systems. Radio waves used in 4G mobile communications serve devices within a radius of several kilometers around each base station; see Figure 2. However, as the frequencies increase, the serving distance shrinks. For example, the millimeter-wave communications adopted in 5G is limited to a range of 50m, even in good conditions. With terahertz-wave communications, the radius is under 10m, equivalent to the range of Bluetooth. Tis is not going to support basestation-to-device communication, which in turn will lead to solutions where each individual device will act as a base station, supporting a network by relaying communication via multiple devices.
More personal devices Today we have wearable devices such as smart watches, but soon we will also have “hearable” devices that provide an uninterrupted stream of auditory information to the wearer. We will also see something called “vitals sensing” that detect people’s everyday activities, but also their physical and mental wellbeing. In the automotive world we expect petrol-powered vehicles to
be replaced by electric ones (EVs), with self-driving cars entering the fray. Leading automotive companies are already embarking on large-scale technological innovation in line with the CASE (connected, autonomous, sharing and service, electric) trend.
34 April 2023
www.electronicsworld.co.uk
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