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Comment by stbtrax | Hacker News Reader

Having been in emb systems for a decade+: I'm not sure I agree with that. MCU prices have been relatively stable for the past decade. Sleep modes etc have existed for a while and are not drawing in new people. VCs are investing less in HW startups. Most won't invest in ones that don't have recurring revenue. Imaging sensors are made by a few large players and CMOS on-chip motion is not that useful since you can do the same thing with PIR. AI accelerators coming in to emb linux class projects is a new thing but I'm not sure who is using that besides the big companies at this point. Also, the growth in C++ is probably in the new standards, which are not well supported for embedded compilers (emb linux excluded)

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Perhaps the recent industry growth isn't as great as I outlined. However I do believe that many more small projects are being started up (one of the reasons could be as simple as newly found time during months of quarantine).

I do maintain that CMOS on-chip motion is useful because adding a PIR sensor is prohibitive for some form factors and more importantly has a lower effective range. What I find even more interesting, from a power usage standpoint, is this recent research on Adaptive Video Subsampling for Energy-Efficient Object Detection[0]. This buys some space on the energy budget for running ML on the device. Although image sensor reading is energy intensive compared to read-write and processor ops by 3 orders of magnitude, as outlined in the second slide of [0] we can see that LTE comms are a further 3-5 orders of magnitude more expensive than image sensor reads. Topically, here is some research on real-time wake from ultra-low power sleep (~10nW) and lowered idle SRAM usage [1] as well as the proposal for no power IR sensing [2].

[0] https://www.tinyml.org/summit/posters/Jayasuriya,%20tinyML%2...

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9063136

[2] https://eri-summit.darpa.mil/docs/ERIPoster_Applications_N-Z...

IMO it's more the flash than the CPU that puts the lower bound on power consumption with the smaller MCUs once you start sleeping.

>Also, the growth in C++ is probably in the new standards,

This, especially since growth here means growth in queries.

> IMO it's more the flash than the CPU that puts the lower bound on power consumption with the smaller MCUs once you start sleeping.

Agreed! There are some novel remarks on that in the link under "[1]" in my reply to the parent comment.

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