Research Articles

The automotive sector is rapidly electrifying, with electric car sales totaling over 5.8 million units in the first half of 2023 across China, Europe, and the US. While automotive electrification is at the forefront of the public eye, other vehicle sectors also present huge opportunities, with IDTechEx predicting the global market of electric vehicles for land, sea, and air to be worth over US$1 trillion in 2044 (excl. automotive).

Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR and AR) headsets share, on the surface, 90% of the same component parts. However, two key technologies separate the former product category, which has sold in the millions on the consumer mass market, from the latter, which is yet to crack the mainstream market. Near-eye optics form one part of the puzzle, but display systems offer an equal challenge.

Ensuring that sensitive electronic components are not adversely affected by radiated electromagnetic interference (EMI) is an essential part of circuit design. Where compactness and close component proximity are a priority, such as in smartphones and smartwatches, conventional board-level shielding with metallic enclosures is increasingly being replaced with conformal package-level shielding.

Friday 10 November 2023 - Summary of 5G Progress: An overview of 5G commercial advancements in the past year, along with future growth prospects; 6G Tech Trends: Insights into the key technology trends in 6G development, identification of key contributors, and the overarching goals; 6G Networks Enablers: Understanding how non-terrestrial network and a smart electromagnetic (EM) environment through technologies like smart skins, repeaters, and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) can contribute to 6G network deployment; Applications in 5G and Future 6G: Examination of the current state of 5G adoption across industries and a glimpse into the potential applications that 6G will address in the future.

Wednesday 15 November 2023 - Electric vehicles: Battery strategies; Battery thermal interface materials; Direct oil cooling electric motors; Power electronics and adoption of wide bandgap semiconductors; Fire protection materials. Data centers: Increasing design power; Liquid cooling thermal management strategies; Industrial collaborations and opportunities for players

Tunneling magneto resistance sensors are rapidly disrupting the automotive and wearables industry. These tiny sensors leverage quantum phenomena to provide a performance edge over classical incumbents, including industry mainstays such as Hall effect sensors. Although they don't depend on the more exciting effects such as superposition and entanglement, in this article, IDTechEx highlights the lessons to be learned from the success of TMR sensors in the emerging quantum sensor market.

Wednesday 25 October 2023 - Air Quality Monitoring Technology: Comparing the Opportunities in Smart Cities, Smart Buildings, and Smart Homes - What are the latest innovations in miniaturized gas sensor technology? What is the state of the market for air quality monitoring? Why is adoption into 'smart-cities' still niche? How do opportunities compare between smart-building and smart-home?

Thursday 26 October 2023 - Visualizing Beyond the Visible Spectrum: Assessing the Future of Image. Vision beyond visible light spectrum - expanding visualization of electromagnetic spectrum; Growing interest in SWIR imaging and key technologies targeting this space; Challenges facing this sector and opportunities for market entrants; Applications benefitting from SWIR growth from autonomous vehicles to agriculture; Emergence of event-based vision and miniaturized spectrometry

Radars are already cemented into the automotive market as they provide popular ADAS features such as adaptive cruise control (ACC) and blind spot detection (BSD). Despite their near ubiquitous presence in vehicles, IDTechEx's new report "Automotive Radar 2024-2044: Forecast, Technologies, Applications" finds that there is still large growth potential for this sensor, mostly driven by new opportunities for short-range radars.

For thousands of years, people have relied on and continue to rely on their vision to assess their surroundings. They evaluate objects and apply pre-conceived hypotheses based on what they see, and they do this daily.

IDTechEx forecast the Li-ion battery market for electric vehicles to reach US$380 billion by 2034. With this huge increase in value, the safe and reliable operation of these (sometimes combustible) assets while maximizing the performance extracted from them becomes critical. The battery management system (BMS) plays a central role in the safe and reliable operation of Li-ion batteries but is somewhat overlooked with regard to its potential for also moving battery performance forward.

Thursday 19 October 2023 - Introduction to and working principles of redox flow batteries; Energy and power decoupling explained; Levelized cost of storage (LCOS) vs. Li-ion; Introduction to RFB chemistry benchmarking; Current and future market applications of RFBs; discussion on long duration energy storage; Membranes used in redox flow batteries and introduction to other components; Overview of market analysis and recent RFB installations made by key players; IDTechEx's outlook and conclusions