Moore’s Law: Accelerating the Pace of Innovation A Future Look into Ocean Observing Systems

Microprocessor technology has emerged as an essential component for advancing ocean observing platforms. Advances in computing technology are revolutionizing how we design, operate, and manage ocean observing platforms. Looking at the decades ahead, semiconductor design, combined with advances in packaging and manufacturing, will radically reshape the ocean observing landscape. The rise of cloud computing, end-to-end connectivity, edge computing, and foundation model workloads will pave the way for a digital transformation in ocean sciences.These next-generation ocean observing systems will overcome many of the limitations encountered by older designs and will be built on new semiconductor designs with far more capability, agility, customization, resiliency, and scale. These advances will be driven by multi-die designs, software-defined systems that enable energy efficiency, high-performance adaptive computing platforms, advanced data processing, and novel packaging advances.New information flows and near real-time communications, combined with semiconductor packages known as Chiplets, will usher in a new era of intelligent, end-to-end observing systems to perform tasks more accurately, consistently, and efficiently than today’s bespoke solutions.Bringing to market simplified, low-cost solutions will require new interdisciplinary approaches and collaboration between the ocean community, the technology industry and public-private partnerships to accelerate future solutions at scale. This paper will highlight several key forward looking microprocessor technology advances and architecture examples that will reshape the ocean observing landscape.