Making Dumb Things Smart

There's just no excuse for being dumb anymore. With today's technology, we can make anything smart (note, though, how I said anything, not anyone). It seems that the "smart fill-in-the-blank" news releases have been swirling around in a frenzy — smart bricks, smart pens, smart you name it. No killer apps driving the semiconductor market anymore? Well, it's because semiconductors are going everywhere these days, and will be forced into even more places in years to come.

We already have several smart devices in our everyday lives. Washing machines, for example, have been incorporating fuzzy logic for years, dealing not only with whether they're outputting cold or hard water, but also such questions as, "Is the tub half full or half empty?"

It was about a year ago that researchers at the University of Illinois introduced their "smart brick," designed to monitor a building's health and potentially save lives. The bricks incorporate such things as sensor fusion, signal processing and wireless technology to monitor a building's temperature, vibration and movement. In a statement released at the time, Chang Liu, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Illinois, said, "We are living with more and more smart electronics all around us, but we still live and work in fairly dumb buildings." Well, I'm not sure that's really a fair statement, given that these buildings have not had the educational opportunities afforded the typical suburban child.

The release went on to say that, in addition to keeping tabs on a building's health, applications include creating interactive "smart toys" that respond to the touch of a child. The sensor capability would be incorporated into a doll so that it could distinguish between a caress and a slap and "react accordingly." Any comment here will just get me in trouble.

Just a couple months ago, Infineon Technologies and German carpet maker Vorwerk Teppichwerke announced their Thinking Carpet, an electronically networked, high-tech carpet that is designed to take over control of alarm, climate, regulatory or guidance systems in a room. Infineon is aiming to integrate the necessary functionality in a chip size of ~7 × 7 mm. The developers assure the public, however, that the Thinking Carpet will be a "completely normal carpet."

In Massachusetts, Stop & Shop grocery stores plan to roll out (so to speak) smart shopping carts developed by IBM and Cuesol. The store's new Shopping Buddy includes a wireless, touch-screen IBM computer on the cart, equipped with a laser scanner to allow shoppers to scan items as they place them in the cart. I'm actually very excited about this one. It could potentially save my wife from having to write so many notes in the margins of the shopping list on those few times that she trusts me to do the grocery shopping. The cart would know if I tried to buy the wrong brand of mayonnaise, because it would know what my wife usually buys.

According to the press release, shoppers can also scan their loyalty cards into the cart "to alert the store that they have arrived." Alert! Aaron Hand's in the store, and he's got those three kids in tow. He's letting his 4-year-old push the shopping cart again...cleanup on aisle 4. And let me just add that, Internet capabilities or not, you can rest assured the cart will still veer to the right, and the back wheel will shake uncontrollably.

Now here's the part where I spin all of this into a shameless promotion of some great new stuff coming from Semiconductor International. Some of you may be aware of our digital edition (some of you are no doubt reading it now), an electronic replica of the magazine. I'm going to call this our Smart Magazine. Not that I want to imply that the print version is dumb. But the digital version includes hyperlinks to web addresses and e-mail addresses, and links directly to articles from the Table of Contents, etc. And — check it out — this month we're even including video in our editorial pages. Turn to page 26, where you'll find Pete Singer's monthly column on Emerging Technologies . If you're looking at the print (aka dumb) version of SI, what you'll see are still graphics of IBM's hybrid-orientation substrate. But if you're reading the digital edition, you'll see one of those images replaced with a movie of how the substrate is built. Pretty smart, eh?