Silicon innovation is gearing up as manufacturers outside of traditional client, server, or mobile computing make their products more intelligent and more intelligently. As a result of increasingly software-enabled product definition, experience design is becoming an integral part of engineering teams.
A systems engineering boss at a leading car OEM told me recently, “We need to focus more on user experience because buttons in the cockpit keep disappearing”. Writing this now using a virtual keyboard on a phone with no wires is literal proof that, “software is eating the world”. But the experience of writing (or reading) something on LinkedIn is not only down to software but also a screen, sensors, a battery, and, above all, a lot of very efficient silicon – a cyber-physical system that gives us superpowers.
New AI paradigms, along with virtual twins, are powering the innovation of things, such as robots and spatial computers but the engineering of systems is fundamentally powered by the engineering of silicon. This relationship makes advances in silicon a leading indicator for advances in nearly every other industry and there is now a frenzy to build more fabs on smaller nodes to support more diverse instruction sets than ever before. This will have radical consequences for other industries.
In part, the silicon expansion is being driven by government investment into established players, with billions flowing to Intel, TSMC & Samsung from the US CHIPS Act alone (the EU is making a similar play). The flood of investment dollars is also boosting new ventures, such as the Snapdragon X ELITE, Jim Keller’s Tenstorrent, and a wave of in-house silicon being developed by everyone from hyperscalers to car companies.
This progress at the base of the real economy stack will ultimately create a value dividend all the way up. More powerful chips will lead to more capable software, fuelling more intelligent product ecosystems, more responsive services, and more transformative experiences for more people. The progression of economic value coming in the next few years is inevitable but because it’s not yet here, cause and effect are not immediately obvious. How are we going to get organized to deliver this progress, when it will only be observable after the fact?
The impending boost to the experience economy means it’s time to reorganize. To date, experience engineering was mostly a concern of functions outside product development such as marketing and sales. This was mostly a consequence of the explosion of computing triggered by the Internet, to date mostly felt in publishing, advertising, commerce, and business services. However, the arrival of more powerful silicon will drive the arrival of experience engineering within many more categories. Organizational reform is a logical consequence of this evolution of data processing architectures: ECUs in cars give way to high-performance computing and PLC’s in factories give way to processing capable of greater autonomy.
The industries most likely affected in the short term will be those where there is already a lot of computing, albeit on less advanced silicon, which is why we keep seeing demos of smart factories, smart cars, and smart medical devices. However, to deliver the benefits of the new potential, developers need to be able to model use cases across domains and incorporate end-user experience through the stack.
Tom is a digital transformation specialist who has worked for more than fifteen years in a startup and consulting setting. He built up technologies and capabilities in support of commercial innovation programs at blue-chip brands across a variety of verticals including mobility, health, energy and financial services. Since 2020 he manages Dassault Systèmes 3DEXCITE as Chief Executive Officer.