Forget about smart phones and smart computers. Cheap and plentiful sensor chips are making possible everything from smart Band-Aids to smart bottles.
NXP Semiconductors, a chip maker that spun out of Philips in 2006, showed off prototypes for these cool applications at its headquarters in San Jose, Calif., yesterday. Based on the working products and prototypes there, it's clear we're headed for a wonderful world of wireless sensors.
Pictured above is a smart Band-Aid, which has sensors that can detect whether a wound is bleeding or is getting infected. It can also send out a signal notifying a caregiver when it's time for a bandage change. The bandage prototype from Urgo Laboratories uses a sensor chip to detect humidity and pressure. It also has a self-powered stretchable antenna to communicate wirelessly to a caregiver. NXP can package a digital signal processor with it to process data from the sensor.
NXP also makes magnetic induction radios (left) that consume a very small amount of power. These can be used in hearing aids (right) that can wirelessly communicate with each other, from ear to ear. The benefit is improved sound quality and a better ability to discern the direction a sound is coming from.
Sensor chips and other analog and "mixed signal" devices -- which capture data from the real world and process it into computer form -- are going through their own revolution now as miniaturization advances and costs drop, says Mike Noonen, senior vice president of marketing at NXP, which makes chips for 13 different markets from consumer digital devices to smart sensors.
Another cool application is the "smart bottle." The company showed off how a second-generation radio frequency identification (RFID) tag embedded into the plastic bottom of a pill bottle can identify whether the pills are authentic, counterfeit, or expired.
And here's a new business model for cars: What if you could get a car for free, and pay only for usage? OK, that's my idea, not theirs. But yo can see how this kind of nutty business idea might make sense, if you get people to pay for usage rather than make a big upfront purchase. NXP's Automotive Telematics on-board unit Platform (ATOP) is kind of like Lojack, OnStar, and Fast Pass all combined into one system on a chip for your car.
ATOP can use the wireless phone network and the global positioning system (GPS) navigation to locate your car and figure out which toll roads you're traveling on. It can automatically deduct the toll from your FastPass-like account as you pass by toll locations. The good thing is there is no need to have toll booths or sensors in the roads, since the GPS location app will determine when and where to deduct tolls. And if you need roadside emergency service or your car is stolen, it's easy to fix the location of the vehicle with ATOP.
NXP's working to improve power efficiency in lighting, too. The company makes drivers for light-emitting diodes, the colorful LED lights that illuminate everything from TVs to laptops. It has made progress in creating drivers for white-light LEDs that can
be precisely dimmed or brightened without flickering. The LEDs can also be used to drive lots of power-efficient lights in densely-packed devices like this Japanese Pachinko machine. How's that for progress? LEDs save a lot of energy usage -- as much as five times more efficient than incandescent bulbs -- so that we can just use a lot more of them to light up the world.
NXP makes 26,000 different chips. And it has 6,000 research and development engineers and an R&D budget of $175 million per quarter. So you can expect a lot more of this in the future.