On ambient intelligence, needful things and process technologies

The ongoing miniaturization of electronic circuits and the corresponding exponential increase in embedded computational power is reaching the point where it becomes viable to integrate electronics into people environments. Ambient intelligence refers to an electronic environment that is sensitive and responsive to the presence of people. Such an environment should be (1) ubiquitous: surrounding the user by a multitude of interconnected systems; (2) transparent: integrated and hidden into the background; (3) intelligent: adapting to the people that live in it. The potential to distribute functionality over a network of devices is determined by the power resources of the device and upon considering these demands it appears helpful to further classify in-home ambient intelligence "devices" into three distinct classes: the "watt-node", "milli-watt-node", and "micro-watt-node". In this paper we try to map the system needs associated with these nodes, differing by orders of magnitude with respect to the amount of information to be processed as well as the available power, on to requirements for Si process technology choices.