Special Report: 2026 Market Forecast

Industry experts predict where important technology markets are headed this year.

William G. Wong

Related To:

Electronic Design

April 7, 2026

2 min read

What you'll learn:

What's new in healthcare.
How physical AI is developing into products.
Where data center storage is headed.

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Figuring out where the markets are headed this year is a challenge because of the turmoil due to wars, tariffs, and politics. These issues may impact the speed at which new technology is delivered, but it’s often a matter of adjusting the level of the trend rather than a radical course change.

This year we asked our contributors to focus on a narrow topic rather than a broad, AI-in-everything overview. The contributions for this Special Report focus on markets such as healthcare, physical AI, data centers, and wireless communication. These markets are all seeing new technologies emerge, refinement of existing technologies, and opening new applications courtesy of the latest products and services.

You can download the full report as an eBook or you can read the individual articles online. The eBook and articles are available to Electronic Design members. Registration is fast and free.

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Download this Special Report eBook

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Special Report: 2026 Technology Forecast eBook

Read the Special Report Articles Online

Connected Care: 3 Predictions for the Future of Wireless Healthcare

As Bluetooth and other wireless technologies enable continuous health monitoring, the lines between consumer and medical electronics are blurring.

Physical AI's Push Shifts into High Gear

As the move to physical AI speeds up, how do you make sure these capabilities become broadly accessible and not limited to only high-performance systems?

Data Center Storage in 2026: When Storage, AI, and Compute Converge

New workload demands are turning data handling into a system-level design challenge rather than a back-end afterthought.

What’s Next for Wi-Fi: Key Trends for 2026

In 2026, several key developments will impact Wi-Fi, from wider Wi-Fi 7 infrastructure adoption to new peer-to-peer capabilities and advances in sensing and locationing.

Some of Last Year's Forecasts

Megatrends Set to Transform the Semiconductor Industry in 2025

In the wake of AI, unprecedented demand for data and computing power is outstripping capabilities. This will drive the semiconductor industry’s return to growth, but without better...

The Chiplet Market Today and Where We’re Headed

Objective Analysis’ Jim Handy provides insight into the growth of chiplets.

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About the Author

William G. Wong

Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our template and send to me along with a signed release form.

Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.