Top 5 technologies for electronics, IT innovation

Market news | March 4, 2021

By Rich Pell

Sensing / Conditioning Data Acquisition Software & Embedded tools IoT Power Management Displays & Interfaces Wearables Artificial Intelligence Digital Signal Processing Memory & Data Storage Medical Electronics Wireless Communications MPUs/MCUs

Digital transformation is one of the hottest topics in every industry, says the firm, and as consumers are eagerly adopting increasing amounts of digital tech, electronics and IT players have a unique opportunity to impact more industries than ever before. The latest report is designed to help guide innovation in this booming space.

The Foresight 2021 report identifies and ranks 12 key technologies that the firm predicts will reshape the world in the coming years. The technologies are chosen based on innovation interest scores from a composite measure assembled from a variety of innovation data sources, along with input from the firm’s experts.

In addition to highlighting the overall technologies, says the company, for the first time ever, this year’s report ranks the top five technologies for the electronics and IT space to watch. The report analyzes the digital transformation space, reviewing what topics emerged and which technologies gained traction during 2020, and analyzes what it predicts will be the top five technologies electronics and IT innovation leaders should look to in the next decade:

AI-Enabled Sensors – Merging hardware and software to collect and validate critical data will be a major part of use cases from consumer wearables to medical devices to industrial IoT.
Digital Biomarkers – Using data analytics to detect disease through changes in streams of data analytics is a potent path for electronics companies to grab a piece of the healthcare pie.
Natural Language Processing – Natural language processing (NLP) allows electronics and IT players to extend into new services and industry segments, either by using it to leverage their own data or by providing it as a service.
Edge Computing – Limitations in bandwidth and latency are pushing critical computation away from the cloud and out to the edge, with rapidly improving hardware and software enablers.
Synthetic Data – AI needs vast amounts of training data, and when real data is scarce, synthetic data can be a solution. It also boosts data diversity and privacy.

“Digital transformation as a concept has reached a point where developers and end users have to look past the hype and find real ROI from deployment of digital technologies,” says Kevin See, Ph.D., Vice President of Research at Lux Research. “The central theme of these technologies is extracting value from data – whether layering AI on sensor outputs, analyzing digital biomarkers to detect conditions, or using edge computing to extract insight locally in close to real time. These technologies are primed to impact every industry, from healthcare to manufacturing and beyond.”

For more, see the report: “5 Most Impactful Technologies for the Electronics and IT Industry.”