Ultrafast or ultrashort pulse lasers have become essential manufacturing tools across industries, such as automotive, medical device, and consumer electronics, owing to the advantages, such as enhanced dimensional accuracy and tighter tolerances, and elimination of post-processing steps.  Industries have moved from laser cut technology to ultrafast laser technology for the machining accuracy and thus enabling early time to market. Although these laser (typically in the form of oscillators and amplifiers) equipment tend to have high initial costs, the improvement in process precision reduces the overall time and operating cost for the production line, which is the primary reason for the adoption of material processing applications.

Radar has long been utilized for military and non-military purposes, across a wide variety of applications, such as imaging, guidance, remote sensing, and global positioning. In 1950s, the side looking airborne radar (SLAR) was developed, which allowed for scanning by a fixed beam, pointed to the side, with the aircraft’s motion moving the beam across the land. However, the image formed by SLAR is poor in azimuth resolution. For SLAR, the smaller the azimuth beam width, the finer the azimuth resolution. In order to obtain a high-resolution image, one has to resort either to an impractically long antenna, or employ wavelengths so short that the radar must contend with severe attenuation in the atmosphere.

Spine surgery is one of the fast-growing surgical techniques. It has evolved into one of the major segments of the orthopedic industry. Spinal surgery is traditionally performed as open surgery, wherein a long incision allows a surgeon to access the spinal anatomy of a body.  However, owing to the recent technological advances, the number of minimally invasive procedures has increased significantly, thereby, the report covers minimally invasive procedures, along with the traditional open surgery techniques. The market estimates provided in this report have been derived as a product of average selling price (ASP) and the volume sold in a year.

Wearable technology is an emerging trend that integrates electronics to the daily activities and fits into the changing lifestyles, and can be worn on any part of the body. The ability to connect to the Internet, and enabling data exchange between a network and a device, is the driving factor that leads to the trend of wearable technology. Wearables imply wristbands that are launched by companies like Fitbit, Jawbone, Apple, and act as activity trackers, which has gained significant traction, owing to the boom in the fitness trend across consumers. In fact, the number of wristbands/fitness trackers that monitor heart rate and physical activity increased from 58,000 in 2010 to 22.295 million in 2016. The companies later expanded their market reach by introducing new products, and reported number of devices sold in 2018 to be 13.939 million. The decreased y-o-y sales can be attributed to the increased share of other fitness tracker providers.

These thermostats are termed as 'smart‘, due to the inherent capabilities of being able to communicate with IoT devices within a smart building, ability to learn with AI capabilities, active geofencing features, reduce energy consumption, and ability to communicate with emerging virtual private assistants.Smart thermostats refer to the devices that allow remote connectivity and can be managed through a handheld device, finding its applications in residential sector. These are the devices that are connected and allow remote connectivity in the consumer sector. Therefore, the non-programmable devices, and the devices used to control the appliance temperature in industrial sector are not made a part of the study scope.

Smart metering solutions comprises of meters or modules with communication capabilities (either unidirectional or bidirectional), embedded within the meter or attached to the meter. Smart electricity meters account for the most significant share of the total market, which is expected to witnesses a declining demand, primarily due to decline in volume sale from China, the largest market for these systems. Although the overall market in terms of shipments is declining, the market excluding China is expected to witness substantial growth. Europe is one of the major markets where smart electricity meters are expected to witness opportunities for growth.

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Smart Manufacturing are systems that are “fully-integrated, collaborative manufacturing systems that respond in real time to meet changing demands and conditions in the factory, in the supply network, and customer needs.” The term "smart" encompasses organizations that develop and use data and information throughout the product life cycle, intending to create flexible manufacturing processes that respond rapidly to changes in demand at low cost to the firm, without affecting the efficiency and environment.

5G+AI破解VR/AR落地瓶颈。VR/AR逐步落地，巨头纷纷布局。5G+AI时代，VR/AR迎来真正春天。

据清科研究数据显示，2018 年前 11 月中国股权投资市场共募集金额累计接近 1.15万亿，同比下降 28.7%。