As part of its industrial showcase at Electronica 2018 in Munich, in Germany, last week, semiconductor manufacturer STMicroelectronics brought artificial intelligence (AI) right to the factory floor.
The Swiss-French firm showed low-power 32-bit micro-controllers running AI-enhanced technologies for condition monitoring and predictive maintenance. The point was to show how embedded systems can move processing from the cloud to the edge node, taking the long-hop data transfer, with all its latency and security associations, out of the equation.
Turbo-charging embedded systems, to enable more powerful edge computing, is crucial for low latency digital applications, including industrial IoT and future driving systems.
Alongside, as part of a factory control centre set-up at Electronica, STMicro demonstrated motor controls, power and energy management functions, and industrial sensors.
Its industrial control centre mock-up used a range of connectivity technologies, including Bluetooth low energy-mesh networking, NFC, and a number of next generation IoT standards.
STMicro said embedded AI can be swift and efficient. By giving data processing capabilities to embedded systems on a network, it can contribute to the construction of a distributed IoT model, it said.
The Munich fair focused, invariably, on the digital transformation of the car market, with the electrification and automation of driving, and the rise of intelligent transport systems.
STMicro hosted a smart driving area on its stand, with technology demonstrations of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), secure infotainment and telematics, and in-cabin imaging for driver monitoring, radar sensing, precise positioning, vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications, and over-the-air system updating.
Meanwhile, along with Dutch rival NXP, STMicro used the event to launch a six-axis inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor, available to industrialists on a 10 year guarantee.
Containing a three-axis accelerometer and a three-axis gyroscope, the ISM330DLC sensor provides high measurement resolution and energy-saving features for long-lasting battery devices. It is ideal for industrial IoT systems, robots, drones, and telematics, said STMicro.
The company also showed a new coin-sized all-in-one IoT-node development kit, built around the company’s BlueNRG-2 single-mode system-on-chip (SoC). The BlueNRG-2 Tile provides control and processing power to a full complement of sensors, while also communicating via Bluetooth 5.0 with a free smartphone demo app.
Powered by an Arm Cortex-M0-core with up to 256KB of embedded flash memory, the BlueNRG-2 supports mesh networking up to 32k nodes, extending the range of sensing and remote monitoring for a wide range of IoT applications, from small smart-home to large industrial infrastructure projects.
