“By 2025, there will be approximately 27 billion connected IoT devices. Someone is going to have to manufacture these, and OEMs are gearing up to enable as many functions as possible to be integrated into the devices they build.”
IoT relies on manufacturing efficiency to get massive volumes of devices out into the market at an acceptable price and rapidly enough to take advantage of opportunities.
Manufacturers have been challenged to ensure all the capabilities an IoT device needs can be accommodated within often small form factors without causing interference or excessive power consumption. These design issues then become production issues as the factory environment needs to be able to take account of variations while working within size, weight and price constraints.
The advantage of adding as many functional blocks as possible at the point of manufacture is that it simplifies and accelerates deployment and installation of IoT devices enabling use cases to become reality faster, less expensively and with minimised manual or physical interactions.
However, there are substantial production complexities, security, connectivity, reliability and compliance issues for OEMs to overcome and they must do so as their production lines scale up to meet demand for the next generation of IoT devices.