This article is part of Electronic Design’s 2024 Technology Forecast series.
What you’ll learn:
- What's in store for AI this year?
- What’s new at Electronic Design?
This year will bring about lots of changes for our industry and our publication. Topics like artificial intelligence (AI) and chip designs will continue to fill our pages and website with interesting and challenging details.
One big change on our side is an all-digital move to six issues per year, which you will be able to view online using our new interface or download a PDF copy. Of course, you can still see the latest via newsletters to get notification of all our articles and videos as well as our new podcast, Inside Electronics, hosted by technology editor Alix Paultre.
Our 2024 Electronic Design Technology Forecast series is off to a great start. We highlight some of the latest in our upcoming Jan.-Feb. digital issue, with more to appear online over the coming months. Not surprisingly, AI is one of the most noted topics. I wanted to touch on it briefly to point designers to the differences in this broad topic area.
AI is as broad a topic as analog or any other electronics subject matter we cover. However, like embedded software, many aspects are almost unrelated when getting to the specifics of the technology.
In the case of AI, much of the editorial noise these days is about large language models (LLMs) and chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT. We do address these along with the hardware and software that support LLMs, but it’s a small fraction of the range of AI technologies available to embedded developers. Likewise, focused generative AI/LLM use offers significant benefits and is more applicable to embedded applications.
For example, microcontrollers are quite capable of running small AI models even without hardware acceleration. Plus, these days, hardware acceleration is even incorporated in Arm- and RISC-V-based single-core microcontrollers.
Developers also need to consider the types of AI models and software being used—including their use and quality right now. While many public LLMs are essentially global beta testing, production-quality AI solutions are being deployed in applications from automotive ADAS to improved motor control.
Electronic Design will continue to bring you the latest from RISC-V to Rust to robots (operating systems) in 2024, which will include forecasts from industry experts. I hope you will join us.
Read more articles in Electronic Design’s 2024 Technology Forecast series.