System design challenges for future consumer devices: From glass to Chromebooks

Internet and mobile application have been the driving force for semiconductor innovation in the past 10 years. In this paper, we will focus on the system design challenges for today's and tomorrow's consumer gadgets from productivity laptop computers to wearable glasses. We will start with everyone's favorite apps such as finding the fastest route to a baseball game with Google maps, taking family pictures and sharing with Google photos, watching TV shows on YouTube, calling grandparents with Hangouts, writing a research paper with Google Doc/Drive. We will break these activities into various system requirements for the software application developers, system architects, technologists and hardware engineers. The design challenges often result from the laws of physics such as the memory latency and thermal management or the law of economics such as cost and time to market. We will describe areas where hardware and software communities can work together to deliver the ultimate user satisfaction. Finally, a few future research areas in memory architecture, package technology and circuit design will be discussed.