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For the last few decades communication and consumer electronics are the major growth driver for semiconductor industry. But standardization of hardware in these two sectors has resulted in fewer innovation in the hardware. Products in these two sectors are getting differentiated by software more than hardware. Also the development and manufcturing cost for SoC targeted for these two segments have increased significantly.
Will medical, automotive and industrial replace communication and consumer sector as new area of innovation and growth for the semiconductor industry, particularly medical electronics?
Advancement of MEMS has made is possible to have micro heater, micro camera inside a chip. Also sensors technology has improved a lot and small micorprocessor can be integrated with the sensor to make it intelligent. This has made it possible to have smaller, smarter and better connected medical devices. In future perhaps a complete lab can be implemented in a chip resulting of lab-on-chip.
In past we have seen PC/ laptop has replaced mainframe and then smartphone/ tablet are replacing PC/ laptop. Similarly smaller medical devices have replaced bigger labs and now it is time to replace those medical devices by lab-on-chip.
Interestingly, medical mobile devices including fitness devices were a big part of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year and I expect it to be bigger next year. So yes, medical is a semiconductor driver in the mobile space.
I agree with your assessment and have been waiting for almost 5-10 years to see some kind of dominant trend to make sense out of things for semi industry in medical field. After the smart phone revolution, I expected to see numerous plug and play hardware/software solutions around iphones/android phones to do simple things like :- Diabetes management ( standalone glucose measurement are still cumbersome to use), basic cholesterol checks which are restricted to once in a year/3 year depending upon age group), preventive check-ups people can do at home to detect early cancer etc. I strongly beleive it is not hard to develop a phone based medical device communicating to Cloud/Central server solution. I am guessing many stealth mode start-ups or incubators in Big companies are working on these solutions and waiting for some one to take a lead to follow or learn from the mistakes from the early pioneers. I personally think that lot of Techies would find it very career satisfying to work on those technologies and solutions rather than blindly following this band wagon of Cheaper, Faster and better Semi Wafers( Steroid side effects of Moorse's Law)
Few of the dominant trend in medical electronics area I am seeing
1. More and more wireless features are getting incorporated in medical devices to improve the usability of the devices. But the question is does incorporation of wireless is also needed at SoC level or integration of wireless SoC and medical SoC at system level is sufficient
2. Sensors are becoming smarter and hence small microprocessor with micro-OS is getting interest for medical SoC
3. Miniaturization of medical devices and development of MEMS based micro heater, image sensor etc
The anti-RF people are ganging up on Smart Meters with "opting out" laws, due to increase in transparency about medical research on non-ionizing radiation impact on the brain, for example. So medical device designers should perhaps focus on a few times a day rather than continuous sampling of blood, heart rates, etc with infrequent communication to the cloud. High risk heart patients may need continuous monitoring, but infrequent communications based on rule sets. The idea of close-proximity RF signals may become a PR nightmare as the sensors get integrated with our bodies. And Smart Meters may have to be shielded on house side, and less frequent in communications as they seem to be a hot button right now that can impact the entire wireless industry.
Check out Mobisante for an innovative example of pairing smartphones with medical devices (full disclosure, I'm a co-founder). But the reason you do not see more of these things is that connecting to a device is terribly hard (and with iDevices, almost impossible due to technical and, lacking a better word, political reasons). Wireless is the best solution, but not if you have a high data rate and need real-time with low latency. If all Android phones and tablets had functional USB host ports (with 500 mA sources) then things would change, quickly, I think.
