Six Key Embedded Systems Industry Trends in 2022
The demand for embedded systems across various industries and technology fields today is as high as ever before. Embedded systems are essential to many electronic devices and automated solutions that we are increasingly relying upon. So it comes as no surprise that the global embedded systems market is rapidly growing. According to a recent study, the total size of the embedded systems market is expected to reach $116.2bn by 2026 from $86.5bn last year, growing at a CAGR of 6.3% from 2021 to 2026.
Even the COVID pandemic and global economic turbulence caused by this healthcare crisis weren’t able to disrupt the consistent growth of the embedded systems market. As the authors of an older market study noted, even though low demand for consumer electronic devices due to COVID lockdowns had its negative impact, it was balanced by the increasing need for various embedded hardware components for the healthcare industry.
Six most interesting embedded systems industry trends in 2022
The abundance of technological and market development trends is another sign that we have all the reasons to feel optimistic about the evolution of the embedded systems industry going forward.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the most interesting and noteworthy trends that, in our opinion, will influence the embedded systems industry in 2022 and over the next few years.
Automotive industry driving embedded systems market growth
When it comes to the applications of embedded systems, the automotive industry today is one of the main drivers of market growth. This trend will most likely further increase in 2022 as well, fueled by continuously rising demand for electric and hybrid vehicles across the globe. The manufacturers of electric and hybrid vehicles rely on embedded systems in a variety of smart electronic components such as advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), power control units, engine cooling systems, etc. Additionally, automotive and mobile robotics industries are also rapidly adopting autonomous technologies and further require the integration of LIDAR, camera, sensor and power subsystems. All these components rely on embedded systems for centralization and coordination on processes.
Explosive demand for military embedded systems
As you may know, embedded systems play a vitally important role in many devices and electronic machine components used for military applications. The demand for weaponry and advanced military equipment has already been on the rise in recent years as a result of escalating regional tensions and geopolitical rivalry around the globe. And we can expect the boost in development of the military embedded systems market as most NATO countries are significantly increasing their defense budgets. Military embedded systems are used in land, sea, and air warfare theaters for a large variety of applications, including unmanned vehicles, counter UAV systems, surveillance systems, weapons guidance systems, communication equipment, command and control solutions, satellite communications, etc.
Following the evolution of military systems, we can clearly see that not just the commercial sector companies are looking to implement AI, 5G, cloud computing, and other technological innovations. Many defense contractors are also interested in tech innovations as a way to produce more advanced systems.
Wider AI and ML integration
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been one of the most significant technology trends in recent years. AI and ML (machine learning) solutions continue to gain momentum and spread across a variety of industries and market segments.
The embedded systems are not an exception, even though AI and ML solutions traditionally have been challenging to implement in embedded systems due to their hardware and framework limitations. But new hardware solutions along with innovative techniques used for inference processing, data curation and performance acceleration help to overcome these obstacles. In 2022, we expect to see even more new embedded implementations leveraging AI and ML technologies.
NVIDIA products are widely used for training and inferencing applications in many AI systems, and Tauro Technologies has been building these systems from their early days. As the industry evolves, other silicon and software solutions are emerging that promise to offer better price–performance ratio for many machine vision applications.
Embedded security and defense against cyber threats
Cyberattacks and information security breaches have been on the rise for a number of years now. And it’s not a secret that embedded systems are known to be vulnerable to hacker attacks and cybersecurity threats of various kinds. There are multiple reasons why embedded systems often fail to provide the appropriate level of protection against cyber threats: poor access control or authentication settings, no regular security updates, remote deployment, reliance on legacy hardware, etc.
This is why the development of embedded security software and hardware is on the rise in recent years, as well as the standards for the security level in embedded hardware designs. Specifically, we have noticed a rise of embedded systems that implement TPM, AES encryption, and FIPS 140 technologies on hardware platforms.
5G technologies and 5G-based embedded systems
The ongoing deployment of 5G infrastructure is expected to be a major growth driver for a variety of technology fields, mainly telecommunications, industrial automation, internet of things (IoT), automotive, etc. The demand for embedded systems based on 5G architecture will also be increasing along with overall 5G implementation progress. Growing communications and processing speed, achieved with 5G architecture, without a doubt will be very helpful to solve the performance issues typical for embedded systems based on communication standards of previous generations.
Virtual and augmented reality with embedded systems
Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) is another major tech industry niche that has been trending for a while, keeps gaining momentum year after year, and received an additional boost thanks to COVID pandemic and increasing global turbulence overall. VR/AR solutions have a wide range of cost-saving and efficiency-improving applications. Modern-day feature-rich virtual environments cannot function without complex high-performance embedded systems. They allow VR/AR solutions to match movements of the user with rendering of graphics, sound and text in real time. We have seen early applications of VR/AR in skills development and training both for industrial and military purposes, which is why we expect the demand for such complex VR/AR embedded systems to increase in 2022 as well.
Final thoughts
Some of the other notable embedded systems industry trends that we didn’t mention in this article are the rapidly growing real-time segment of the market, rising popularity of Python as the main programming language for embedded systems software, related IoT development trends, and more.
What’s also worth mentioning, all six industry trends described above are connected and, in many ways, are fueling each other’s growth. For example, the demand for autonomous vehicles, robotics and AI technologies in commercial and military systems drives the demand for faster 5G communication that can enable the network speed required to fully implement these tech innovations.
Based on the foregoing, it is safe to say that the demand for embedded systems across market niches and applications will be on the rise at least for the next ten years or so. In this increasingly complex and competitive business environment, the importance of professional approach to IoT and embedded systems design starts to play an even more important role.
The Tauro Technologies’ team of electronic engineers and designers has a proven track record of successfully designing custom hardware for various kinds of products in multiple technology fields. Drawing on the specific needs of our clients, we select and apply various engineering methods to electronic product development and manufacturing in order to achieve the desired result. Utilizing our in-house PCB assembly and debug expertise, we are able to build and evaluate your prototypes before high-volume manufacturing, rapidly and cost-efficiently.
Interested to know more? Get in touch with us for details.
