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60 SMT Magazine • November 2015 equate enough for high-speed waveforms when necessary in these applications. To incorporate tactics such as processing raw data into results or adjusting measurement details when certain criteria are met, you must integrate intelligence into the data-acquisition system. With emerging sensor, processor, and bat- tery technologies, intelligence can move much further down the signal chain. With intelli- gence built into the sensor, data does not have to wait until reaching the instrumentation to be processed. For example, some intelligent accelerometers can digitize and perform FFT analysis on vibration data before forwarding that data to instrumentation. Sending frequen- cy data and not raw time domain data reduces the burden on the data transfer and reduces the processing required by the instrumentation. Right now, microelectromechanical systems or MEMS technology is playing a major role in this trend. By using new fabrication techniques, en- tire sensors can now be implemented in a small silicon chip. These new sensors use much less power, require much less space, and are orders of magnitude cheaper to manufacture. Coupled with lower power, lower cost processors, and improved power management techniques, en- gineers can integrate sensing and intelligence at a scale that would be impossible with tradi- tional analog sensors. The rise of Cloud Storage and Computing The unification of DAQ hardware and on- board intelligence has enabled systems to be increasingly embedded or remote. In many in- dustries, it has paved the way for entirely new applications. As a result, the Internet of Things (IoT) is finally unfolding before our very eyes as the physical world is embedded with intel- ligence, and humans now can collect data sets about virtually any environment around them. The ability to process and analyze these new data sets about the physical world will have profound effects across a massive array of in- mANAGING bIG DATA From AN ANALoG WorLD FeaTure