Top 6 Elements of Smart Living

By: Xavier Baraton, STMicroelectronics

By 2030, global population is expected to grow to more than 8 billion people with more than 60% living in the cities. In addition, changing demographics of people living longer than 65 years will nearly double1. The challenge is to maintain people’s quality of life while maintaining (or improving) a city’s competitiveness while addressing the challenges of an aging population, scarce resources and climate change. With Smart Systems in Smart Cities, we can do more with less.

The smart city is built on awareness and (some elements of) real-time control of all of the critical functions and infrastructure of the city. The citizens of the city and their “smart things” are key actors in enabling the smart city to do more with less.

Today, we are entering a new era, in which the “smart home” will continue to provide access to an ever-increasing range of entertainment, information and communication services while also playing a far greater role in many other aspects of our lives, including in health and wellness, domestic security and, particularly important, the need to use energy more efficiently, both to minimize energy costs and to contribute to the worldwide need to develop a sustainable energy strategy to address climate change.

Many factors are enabling this breakthrough in smart homes.  One key factor is the very high level of performance that is possible with today’s “home gateways,” which have evolved from the simple STB to highly sophisticated “electronic front doors” that connect the home to a virtually unlimited pipeline of entertainment and information services with the ability to stream this multimedia content to multiple devices located anywhere in the home.

Smart Home

Another major factor is the significant improvements that have been made in the Price/Power/Performance trade-offs, in all the major semiconductor components such as sensors, microcontrollers, wireless transceivers and power transistors needed for smarter homes, and in the circuit topologies that can best exploit these advances.

Monitoring the Smart Home

In the future Smart homes will be more energy efficient and safer because of a network of monitors and image-sensor cameras distributed around the home. Self-powered nodes will easily be positioned around the home for tasks such as temperature, CO (carbon monoxide) or movement sensing, relaying data wirelessly to a PC or STB/home gateway. The data could then be communicated to a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet via a wireless router to enable monitoring and control.

Smart Metering

Smart meters allow power generators to match consumption more efficiently and give users more control over their usage, providing real-time consumption, quality, and outage information and more flexible tariff schemes and billing.

Smart metering consists of an electronic power meter supplemented by, among other features, full remote control, diagnostics, power peak and consumption analysis, anti-tampering mechanisms, fault alert, and time-variable tariffs. Using Power Line Communication technology (PLC) to connect the meter to the service provider offers the feasibility for all of these features and opens the possibility for compatibility with future smart-grid protocols.

Smart meters include two main functions: a high-accuracy modulator for sensed current and voltage signals and a dedicated metrology processor to calculate consumption.

Renewable Energy Sources

The most promising renewable energy source today is solar power. Maximizing energy harvesting and conversion efficiency is critical to making solar energy competitive with fossil-fuel generation methods.

Smart Buildings

ST has developed a fully automated system architecture based on a real-time communication network among sensors, plugs, power switches and the home controller. The building network uses the smart meter as the link between the external network of energy sources and the internal demand. Optimized energy management, based on dynamic energy tariffs related to peak- and real-time power consumption, will result in valuable energy saving while minimizing inconvenience to the final user.

Smart Factory

With manufacturing consuming more than 40% of global energy1, making factories as energy-efficient as possible is a goal everywhere. Globally, multiple efforts are underway and all of them complementary.

Industrial automation and manufacturing are going through the fourth phase of major change (after lean manufacturing in the 70s, outsourcing in the 90s, and automation in the 2000s).2

One key program is "Industry 4.0." With its origins in Europe, it seeks to bring the advances of the computer revolution to the machines and processes developed in the industrial revolution. A similar undertaking is the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition, which had its origins in the United States.

As with the Smart Grid, these initiatives aim to bring intelligence and inter-communication to factory devices; they envision a day when, for example, factory machines could predict their own failures and automatically trigger pre-emptive maintenance, or when a supply chain can be so closely monitored that factory output would change automatically in response to changes in demand.

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Xavier Baraton is currently heading the Strategic Business developments for Smart City and Consumer Robotics segments within the Greater China and South Asia region of STMicroelectronics. He is based in Hong Kong.