Emerging Markets

While traditional consumer markets maintain an unstoppable momentum towards advanced multimedia and communications, other markets are starting to emerge. These new opportunities benefit from the advanced chips used in our more mainstream markets (e.g., applications processors for mobile), transforming applications that are considered niche today into tomorrow’s high-volume consumer and enterprise products, and, in so doing, significantly enhancing the quality of life for many.

Healthcare – the global trend to an ageing population means that it will be increasingly impractical to continue to rely on hospitals to provide such a large proportion of our healthcare needs. From monitoring non-life-threatening conditions to reliable dispensing of drugs, from continuous reporting and logging of vital body functions to sophisticated alarms alerting your doctor to any unusual conditions, the consumerisation of healthcare into every home has the potential to transform our lives. Key to this exciting market will be technologies such as ultra-low-power communications; home networking; remote communication with medical staff using video and graphics; and innovative new ways of using multimedia to help people better understand and deal with conditions from the comfort of their own homes.

Security – as society becomes ever more mobile, so the challenge to secure homes, offices and other locations becomes more essential and demanding. Cloud-based security offers mainstream consumers the opportunity to secure and monitor their homes and valuables in ways never previously thought possible. Such systems rely on highly flexible low-power communications together with innovative ways to enable users to control and monitor these functions, using new 3D user interfaces and extensive streaming video.

Smart Power – one of the world's biggest challenges is powering the cities and rural areas that are home to most of us. Why is it that semiconductor technologies offer so much functionality while consuming so little power, yet the demands for power continue to skyrocket? The answers lie in a combination of many factors, such as consumer’s appetite for lighting and power-hungry displays, and the insatiable need for ever more broadband internet bandwidth. Imagination leads the world in low-power technology, and is working with partners to address the future of ‘smart grids’ – an increasingly intelligent national power infrastructure that will optimize its behaviour according to the current loads. We're also working hard to foster standardization in areas such as universal power supplies, to stop the unnecessary landfill and power wastage that results from excessive use of today's inefficient, poorly designed and largely incompatible local power supplies.