AI’s Impact Depends On Timing

How Timing Solutions Benefit Today’s and Tomorrow’s Revolutionary Technologies

If you had to provide a surface-level explanation of how an AI application works, you might say:

1. A device, such as a sensor, gathers data.
2. An AI chip processes and analyzes the input. It notices patterns or makes predictions about the data.
3. The device offers an output, such as a solution, based on the data.
4. The more inputs the algorithm is trained on, the more it learns.

For example, when a man undergoes a PET scan to examine the cells in his lung tissue his scan can be analyzed by an AI-powered application. This application detects anomalous activity at the cellular level. This AI tool then provides this data to the pulmonologist to assist in diagnosing the patient. After learning from several patients, this application can make its own diagnosis for the doctor’s consideration.

To advance our explanation slightly, AI provides effective monitoring, data processing and communication to offer users support or “intelligence.” AI-driven devices must master these functions to put data scientists’ and deep learning engineers’ efforts to good use.

For those in the electronics design community, AI’s use of monitoring, processing and communication should sound familiar. Common passive components that engineers rely on every day lay the foundation for AI’s capabilities: real time clocks, crystal tuning forks and quartz crystal oscillators. Timing solutions are critical agents for AI applications.

Timing Solutions Empower AI

The example of a medical device that can employ deep learning anomaly detection and assist doctors with diagnoses is a powerful example of how AI is improving critical industries. This example also implies how clocking participates in AI’s essential functions.

To gain a full understanding of the relationship between AI and frequency, consider a wide range of AI use cases and their dependence on timing solutions across a wide range of industries. Not meant to be exhaustive, these six examples demonstrate the breadth of how AI is already affecting our everyday lives and how frequency-control components support their functionality:

• Automotive: Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) receive external data on traffic and weather to make responsive decisions about how, when and where to drive, ensuring the driver makes optimal, safe decisions. AI driving recommendations rely on stable, precise frequencies for real-time information processing.
• Industrial processes: Anomaly detection on the factory floor helps workers weed out bad inventory or identify failed processes. Again, clean, uninterrupted data communication is essential for up-to-the-moment monitoring and communication.
• Consumer electronics: The latest iteration of the iPhone includes an AI chip that enables Apple’s evolving list of AI features, including the ability to transcribe your phone calls or summarize the text messages you received while you were driving. Crystal oscillators are essential for data transmission and processing for the new iPhone’s natural language processing (NLP) capabilities.
• Smart homes: Devices within the home communicate with each other with the support of timing solutions. Based on new data, such as raised outdoor temperatures, oscillators orchestrate changes to the home environment, including lighting, air quality, window shades and more.
• Smart cities: Sensors that collect data on traffic flow and optimize efficient routes for vehicles depend on frequency to synchronize data communication and orchestrate tasks, like changing routes or traffic signals.

Clocks are critical for all benefits of current and future AI applications. When these timing components are engineered with a small form factor and provide incredibly low frequency drift, high precision and low current draw, they are particularly useful for devices that depend so readily on convenient, efficient electronic communication.

Tried-and-True Timing Solutions For Future-Forward Technologies

The quartz crystal has become an integral part of our electronics for over a century. Although the ways quartz crystal can be leveraged for frequency-control have changed as our technologies have evolved, the fundamentals are the same.

These fundamentals have apparent staying power as we enter a phase where our electronics have not only changed, but as we stand on the precipice of a technological revolution – one that has the power to benefit nearly every part of our lives.

It may seem striking to consider that such small, practical components play a role in what will prove to be a monumental shift in electronic technology. However, quartz crystal enabled the proliferation of radios in our homes, and thereby helped usher in what we now call home entertainment. Without stable frequencies, Wi-Fi would not have been able to expand its reach as a utility and part of the infrastructure that we deeply depend on.

Engineers have leaned on timing solutions for profound shifts in how we interact with technology and how that technology shapes our lives. Real time clocks, crystal tuning forks and quartz crystal oscillators for timing will continue to maintain their prominent place as we embrace artificial intelligence.