Smart sensors are far from a myth, it is already used in million of devices (e.g. your mobile phone might already contain several smart sensors).
Traditionally a number of smart sensors are designed with custom design digital logic (e.g. Finite State Machines) to control the operation of the sensors. In recent years we see a increase of sensors devices with ARM Cortex-M processor built-in. Using a processor based system inside sensors can potentially bring significant benefits over simple sensors designs, for example:
In this article, in addition to the details of above benefits, we also explained how a processor system in a smart sensor could look like, and why the ARM Cortex-M processors are being used in smart sensor products, and various design considerations.