The lack of an appropriate environment for the Internet of Things, which makes it difficult to create innovation and implementation opportunities at the rate of demand growth, is becoming a thing of the past. Now, a key condition is emerging: ecosystems. The Internet of Things (IOT) architecture, built by individual applications, has gradually developed into a mature and complete end-to-end system, integrating data centers and application scenarios involving real consumers. All of this benefits from the four technological pillars that promote the current wave of the Internet of Things.

Sensor technology has been quite mature. Nowadays, sensors have super-small size, high efficiency, energy saving and comprehensive functions, so they have become an important asset of the core of the Internet of Things. According to the current level of science and technology, any physical signal in the human world can be converted into electronic signals, and then into digital data that can be processed by machines to achieve any scenario of application. As an indispensable part of human environmental perception, digital sensing has built a new bridge between human life and technology, whether it is human emotional monitoring in family entertainment system, soil nitrogen saturation in intelligent agriculture applications, or turbine vibration in predictive maintenance scenarios.

The second contributing factor is connectivity. Standards that have been established and validated on site now cover the entire range of connections, from ultra-short distances such as NFC to medium distances (WiFi, Thread, Zigbee, V2X), to wide area networks and the entire city (Lte, LoRa). In the area of WAN, the 5G commitment is about to be fulfilled. At present, the first batch of 5G infrastructure trial operation schemes have been implemented in Europe, China and the United States. In addition, more advanced and powerful technologies such as UWB are also being implemented to further shorten the connection gap and provide support for new application scenarios.

The third pillar is the "edge": this fundamental innovation is pushing more and more intelligent technology to the edge. The old model of generating data at the edge and processing it in the data center has reached its limit. The calculation will then turn quickly to the edge. In fact, IDC predicts that only a year later, 43% of Internet of Things computing takes place on the edge. There are good reasons for this trend. Private edge processing can reduce response time and network congestion. For example, self driving vehicles rely mainly on real-time processing to make the right decisions in an instant. With dedicated processing, there is no need to build inefficient and unresponsive centralized cloud data centers to handle the significant increase in data collection. Dedicated processing is more reliable at the device level and better protects users'privacy because raw data is not uploaded to the cloud.

A recent Cisco study showed that only 9% of respondents in the United States expressed high trust in Internet of Things devices. In other words, in the digital age, if one must always be alert to whether the refrigerator will reveal his privacy, what about happiness? En Zhipu has successful experience in providing solutions for a secure ecosystem, such as security microcontrollers, NFC, payment, access control, high-speed network switches, etc., so our engineers and business people are building trust in the Internet. It has played an important role. This concept of ensuring security through design also includes security manufacturing design, security trust configuration and security delivery, thus establishing the fourth pillar of the Internet of Things ecosystem.

New sensing technology, cross-Global connectivity, the transition from center to edge, and the protection system and equipment through advanced security technology are important driving factors for the realization of the Internet of Things from the exploratory stage. We expect to reach 75 billion interconnected devices by 2025. Terminals may reach trillions. New applications and business models revolve around these devices. The transition from center to edge will bring huge opportunities.