In-Cell touch technology to impact the touch screen industry
Using in-cell touch technology is to grow at a faster rate as the technology gets implemented into even more portable devices. In 2013, 170 million units will be produced, and the growth rate is pegged at 25 per cent for the next four years. This will affect the touch screen industry, as in-cell touch becomes more wide-spread.
Stimulation of demand in establishing large data centers
The growth of the Internet of Things and numerous IoT products available in the market has increased the amount of data available for analytics. The modification in the establishing model of Big Data center has fostered spending in global data center hardware from 2013 to 2017. Numerous hardware firms at Taitronics now have hardware being marketed for big data centers and server farms.
UHD will power LCD TV against OLED TV
Until now, high-resolution TVs running on OLED panels faced issues of high cost and a low defect-free rate as well as a short life cycle. LCD panels with UHD have a better cost advantage compared to OLED at same resolution, thus promoting sales of high resolutions displays which will help the UHD content ecosystem as well — high speed wired networks, connectors, etc.
The New Themes
One interesting bit about this year’s event are the nine different themes that are being showcased at the event, of which the most interesting are ‘Hidden Champions’ and ‘Taiwan Excellence Awards’.
‘Hidden Champions’ is where Taiwanese firms with components running in famous and popular products like those from Apple and Samsung can showcase themselves. The aim of this theme is to show that as long as you have the right design capability, you can take business from your downstream partners.
The ‘Taiwan Excellence Awards’ has had 200 applicants, from which a panel of 7 international judges selects winners.
Some Interesting Products
There were a huge number of firms exhibiting wares at the event, but some firms had special products available for demo. This section covers those which interested me.
Chunghwa Telecom Enterprise Business Group
Using their prowess in wireless communications, Chunghwa Telecom is utilising their advanced broadband and cloud services to enable new technology services focusing on the smart home, smart store, ‘mobile lifestyle’ and cloud enterprise.
Yuan-kuang Tu (Ph.D), President of Chunghwa Telecom showed the various solutions available like an intelligent image-based customer analysis system. This system uses embedded vision functionality to analyse customers and advice the store sales team on which customer is more probable to buy what. It sizes up the customer and provides height, age, gender, viewing distance and specific product interest by analysing body posture of the customer and noting which products were more interesting to the customer.
The embedded vision technology implemented in this system uses both 2D image information and 3D depth information to analyse customers that are viewing digital signage. The system is also able to track multiple customers using a single camera, which tackles the issue of a crowded store overwhelming the cameras. The information gained by using this system will enable store owners to analyse product competitiveness and tweaking promotional designs.
In their ‘mobile lifestyle’ category, they showed a 4-channel fleet management solution. This solution uses an array of cameras and sensors placed inside the fleet vehicles, and tracks data on them. The data is then processed and the gleaned information is used to improve the functioning of the fleet — including vehicle diagnostics based on temperature, RPMs and speed. It integrates GPS, 3G, OBD II, TPMS, vision and cloud technology to implement a variety of features.
The most interesting part, however, is that the company also designed it such that all these 1000s of sensors do not overload the telecom network under which it operates. An executive at the demo area explains that the vehicle only transmits data at certain intervals so as to not overload the network. The system also has on-board unit (OBU) backup solutions in place in the rare case of an emergency, where high quality video is required. Furthermore, the operating voltage of the entire system can be any where between 8V and 36V which allows it to be installed on any kind of automotive. Unsurprisingly, this product also got Chunghwa Telecom the gold medal for technical innovation, from the Taiwan President.
Chroma ATE Inc.
A supplier of precision test and measurement equipment marketed under the brand name Chroma, serve markets including electric vehicles and smart home. Philip Chow, the senior engineer from the marketing department, explained some of their products for design firms targeting the smart grid. They even had one side of the booth dedicated to self-explaining imagery and tools targeting this segment. Examples are a regenerative grid simulator to test smart meters, programmable power sources, and digital power meters to act as a reference meter.
