High Demand for IoT Devices the Way for Industrial Internet Chip Market

Industrial internet of things (IIoT), Industry 4.0, and industrial internet: these terms are now being frequently used and often used interchangeably in today’s era of manufacturing. The wave of industrialization has hit every developed and developing country, causing an unmet demand for industrial internet chips.

The need for connected machines and devices and equipment that could communicate with each other have increased drastically over the last few years. Today, machine-to-machine communication has become an integral part of manufacturing as it monitors physical processes and ultimately takes decentralized decisions.

According to a research firm, Allied Market Research, the growth of the industrial internet chip market is expected to increase in the upcoming 4-5 years, owing to rise in need for application-based microcontrollers, rise in demand for wearable devices, and increase in cheaper wireless sensor networks. However, risks regarding privacy and security of user data raise concerns for adopting industrial internet chips market. On the contrary, rapid developments in technology to conquer such issues have created lucrative opportunities for market players such as ARM Ltd., Cisco Systems, Inc., and Intel Corporation.

Apart from major companies, several startups are also investing in developing novel industrial internet chips. Recently, a startup, Filament, developed a chip that connects blockchain and internet of things (IoT). This chip is developed to enable communication between IoT devices and blockchain. Moreover, the chip has a very minimalistic footprint and consumes very low power. It is secure and has a tough cryptographic chain-of-custody protocol. It supports Hyperledger Sawtooth blockchain and is estimated to expand to encompass the Ethereum blockchain ledger. The overall system is named Blocklet chips and allows any industrial device to help it interact with any blockchain technology. It can complete any online transactions independently and could create contracts that are captured on a blockchain.

Recently, Qualcomm Inc. announced that it will use its subsidiary, Qualcomm Technologies Inc. to provide highly differentiate chipset products, reference designs and more than 30 dedicated platforms that could make easier to participate in industrial IoT. This announcement has increased the company’s revenue to $1 billion. This shows the market demand a platform that would help to design all kinds of IoT application. Moreover, Qualcomm made clear that the company is ready to go toe-to-toe with the chip manufacturers to develop cost-effective industrial internet chips.

There is a high degree of specialization among the market players that focus on developing acceleration chip architecture. According to a survey, Intel leads the market of designing AI chips following the parent company of Google, Alphabet. This specialization in industrial internet chips and the popularity of AI has boosted the race among the chip manufacturers to solve the AI problems on mobile devices. While Silicon Valley is busy competing to develop the fastest and most seamless chips, China has entered the industrial internet market and has already built a competitive semiconductor industry. Although several market experts believe that China never really has “real” chip industry, the increased popularity of AI is expected to offer China the necessary head-start that it required. However, this makes clear that the industrial internet chip market is here to stay and every company that deals with IoT and other AI-based applications must invest in developing the fastest chip to stay in the business.

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