Some of the most compelling advances in the past 20 years have been those in the interfaces between humans and devices. It's not just that we don't have to use a keyboard anymore. (No one misses QUERTY!) The interfaces we have today are more intuitive and efficient, with minimal movement (voice, pointing) to control a huge amount of complexity. It's the interfaces between the digital world and the physical world that make embedded technology meaningful. And these interfaces are one of the key reasons MIPS Technologies acquired analog/mixed-signal IP leader Chipidea.

Oh, excuse me a moment, my personal medical monitoring device is telling me that my blood sugar is low. I'm just going to grab a quick bite to eat. Today's mainstream refrigerator not only closely monitors its own inventory and communicates with the grocery warehouse to keep itself fully stocked, but it monitors the nutritional content of the food I eat to make sure I am keeping to my 2,369 calorie a day diet. It's quite a feat to predict exact dietary requirements factoring in the temperatures I've experienced throughout the day.

What has enabled this complete view of the systems in our lives--from medical monitoring, diagnosis, and advice, to our financial health, to the smart devices that control everything in our connected homes--are, of course, dramatic advances in embedded systems. We've moved from 1988 when a desktop computer was single- to ten-digit MHz, with single-digit megabytes of memory; to 2008 when frequency, capacity and performance each increased by about 1,000 times; to today where those numbers have reached heights that are virtually inconceivable.

Today's embedded systems are prevalent and seamless. They are networked together, constantly accessing and feeding information back to each other. The programmable macro objects of yesterday have given way to softer embedded systems with softer boundaries between the system and the network.

Did I mention that I am driving while I am writing this? My sustainable vehicle is rocketing down the freeway while making sure to keep a comfortable distance from other cars. What? We're there already? That's OK, my car will drop me off and then park itself. Twenty years ago, we were already seeing the results of the first efforts of these types of smart vehicles with SoCs like the EyeQ2 from Mobileye for real-time visual recognition and scene interpretation in intelligent vehicle systems.

Driving the performance of all of these systems has been a great progression in processor technology. Huge advances in raw processing performance have been accompanied by dramatic advances in power and programming efficiency. The embedded designer of 2028 is working with highly abstracted systems and software. Gone are the imperative procedural languages of the past. Today's designer works with a rules-based, natural language description process, describing what he wants the system to do and allowing the system to ask for clarification when appropriate or inconsistent with the description of what is desired. The process of programming algorithms in a procedural language seems quaint, but quite painful as described by those unfortunate enough to have had to do it.