Hi, everyone. I'm Amichai Ron, Senior Vice President of our Embedded Processing and DLP organization. I want to welcome you to day 2 of TI Tech Exchange. You heard Keith Ogboenyiya speak yesterday about several ways semiconductor technology is enabling advancement in automotive. Today, I am excited to speak with you how semiconductors can enhance automation and efficiency across a broad range of industrial systems. 

Both automation and efficiency are critical for every customer I speak with. Our customers would like to create a more efficient system that will enable a higher level of automation and control to maximize productivity. What energizes me is to see how sometimes small innovation at the component level can result in a meaningful cost, energy, and time-saving at the system level. 

Well, there was a lot changing across industries. When I look across the spectrum of applications we support, from robotics, to factory automation, grid, home automation, and many other systems, three consistent trends stand out to me. More sensors and more data; making systems more energy-efficient; and increased connectivity. 

The first trend is increasing the number of sensors in every system. Simply put, more sensors mean more data. Additional data enables systems to act and react more quickly and precisely to the world around them. This is critical for systems involving automation, but this also means there is a greater focus on processing data quickly and efficiently throughout the system. 

In addition, we are now able to identify things we couldn't sense before using new technology methods. I think of our mmWave radar sensing technology as an example. Our highly-integrated TI mmWave radar sensors enable almost any system to detect objects and movement at a very high precision level. 

By taking a technology that was originally large, complex, and expensive, and making it smaller, easier to use, and more affordable, our mmWave radar sensors are making higher precision sensing more accessible for our customers. This type of innovation helps open the door for many new possibilities. Let's take a collaborative robot, or "cobot," as an example. 

Customers can use our radar sensor to enhance perception in cobots. This helps them operate effectively and more safely around humans in a way that was impossible to achieve just a few years ago. Because more sensors means more data, this also means there is more data to process. This influx of data coming into the system requires all of us to think creatively about how to effectively manage data and enable faster, smarter decision-making in the system. One approach might be incorporating AGI-enabled hardware and software into your design to process a higher volume of data and adapt to changing environments in real time. 

Managing inputs from a variety of sources can also be challenging. Going back to the cobot example I mentioned, designers may want to add vision sensing to a cobot to better see obstacles that are closer in proximity. In this example, you now have at least two different sensing technologies to support in your system. 

That's where sensor fusion technology comes in. Incorporating sensor fusion into a system gives designers the flexibility to support multiple types of sensing, like vision sensing, radar, LIDAR, and others that can help enhance the system of the whole perception. While I used the cobot as a common example, it's not difficult to see how the same concept can apply to other applications to enhance automation and increase efficiency. 

The second trend I see is a desire to make systems more energy-efficient. Balancing the increasing demand for higher performance while trying to keep altering the overall system size requires us to reduce the power consumption of our systems. This is also true for battery-operated systems that needs to meet performance demand and stick to a fixed power budget. 

New methods of improving energy efficiency are emerging across nearly every application and subsystem. We see it, for example, in medical applications that are trying to pack more sensors into their existing systems, and in electric vehicles where customers are trying to increase driving range with small, power-efficient batteries. We also see this in HVAC systems. 

Up until a few years ago, all residential HVAC systems used a single-stage compressor. Today, we see more and more systems move to variable-speed compressors that enable more efficient energy uses overall. Variable-speed compressors are managed by specialized processing technologies designed for a real-time control application. And until recently, this technology was expensive and complex to implement. 

By using more affordable real-time control MCUs, like our C2000 device, customers have access to technology that can help maximize motor control and increase energy efficiency within the same system. Transitioning residential houses to variable-speed HVAC system has the potential to result in substantial energy savings across the grid. I'm excited to see how real-time control innovations and improvement in power delivery technologies, like digital power and GaN, can drive additional breakthroughs in system efficiency and power density in the future. 

Finally, the last topic I'll discuss is a move to increase connectivity and collaboration across systems. While our world continues to become more connected on a personal level, there are benefits to enhancing connectivity from a business perspective as well. Let's take factories as an example. 

By adding more sensors and connectivity technologies, companies have greater control and flexibility across their production lines. This may help the company reduce power usage in areas of the building that aren't in use, or help them adjust their production based on changes in demand. This level of flexibility is fueled by industrial communication, and both wired and wireless technologies like ethernet, CAN, Bluetooth, and Zigbee. 

Now let's take the same concept and apply it to a city. By using wireless mesh networks, utility companies are better-able to monitor the network and adapt accordingly. This enhanced connectivity, combined with energy storage systems, like a residential solar home system, can help service providers adjust energy usage during peak hours. 

Our upcoming session with the Wi-SUN Alliance will go into more details on the impact connectivity can have in smart cities. Enhancing connectivity and system support in buildings and smart cities can enable businesses to increase productivity to a new level that was not possible to achieve in the past. While this is just the tip of the iceberg, these three trends outlined key ways semiconductors can help increase automation and improve efficiency in systems. 

Our passion to make electronics more affordable through semiconductors is one of the reasons we want to work alongside our customers to enable a smarter, more efficient, and better-connected system. By giving our customers multiple ways to create and optimize their systems, we can help fuel the next wave of innovation that can sense, process, and react faster than anything we've seen in the past. Thanks for your time today. I hope you enjoy the rest of TI's Tech Exchange and have the opportunity to attend some of our other sessions to learn more from our experts.