by Dan Mandell, Chris Rommel, Joe Abajian & Brendan Bradley | 5/6/2024

 

Embedded World is the premier event on the calendar for IoT, embedded, and edge computing technology and solution providers to showcase new offerings for engineering organizations of all types. Held annually in Nuremberg, Germany and with an additional event being held in the U.S. in October 2024, Embedded World is a unique event bringing together hardware suppliers, embedded software and tool providers, industry experts, cloud services, and end users to share and learn about new technologies and capabilities for industrial, enterprise, and other environments. This year’s event featured more than 32,000 attendees from more than 80 countries and is clearly back to its full, pre‑pandemic levels of attendance and engagement with the ecosystem at large.

VDC created and named the Embeddy Awards to highlight companies announcing important advances in the IoT and embedded software, hardware, and services industries. The Embeddy is awarded for the most cutting‑edge product or service available to embedded software developers and system engineers. Nominees were judged across specific criteria including corporate, technological, and industry significance, as well as the most cutting-edge hardware and software solutions or services.

The 2024 Embeddy Award Winners include:

• IP: Arm Ethos‑U85 NPU
• HARDWARE: Advantech Qualcomm‑powered ROM‑2860 OSM Module
• SOFTWARE: Memfault Device Vitals

Embeddy IP Winner: Arm

Ethos-U85 NPU: Building on the success of previous Ethos-U family NPUs, Arm launched the new Ethos-U85 product offering during Embedded World to deliver a significant performance uplift (4x improvement) and higher power efficiency (20% savings) compared to its predecessor. The new Ethos-U85 is designed to run with Cortex-M up to Cortex‑A‑based Armv9 systems with configurations from 128 to 2048 MACs/cycles – translating into 256 GOPS/s to 4 TOP/s at 1GHz. It will feature native hardware support for transformer networks and DeeplabV3 semantic segmentation networks as well as for 2/4 sparsity to double the throughput. The Ethos‑U85 is aimed at IoT applications with ramping performance demands, such as within factory automation and commercial or smart home cameras, for object classification, real‑time recognition, generative AI, and other applications.

Image: Arm Ethos-U Lineup

Embeddy Hardware Winner: Advantech

Qualcomm-powered ROM-2860 OSM Module: At this year’s Embedded World event, Advantech announced its strategic collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies to jointly pursue the vast and fragmented edge AI space across a range of sectors including energy, industrial automation, medical, robotics, and transportation. Advantech is looking to integrated Qualcomm solutions across its platforms, including AI‑on‑Modules, function boards, and AI edge systems.

One of the initial products stemming from the collaboration is the new ROM‑2860, a computing module designed to the Size‑L lineup of Open Standard Modules (OSM), which is a rapidly growing solder‑on module standard in the embedded market. The module is powered by the Qualcomm Octa‑core QCS6490 processor, features 12 TOP/S of AI capability and dual‑camera support for machine vision, supports Windows 11 on ARM, and provides access to tools like Qualcomm Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine SDK, Qualcomm AI Hub, and Microsoft Azure AI Service.

Image: Advantech ROM-2860 OSM Module

Embeddy Software Winner: Memfault

Memfault Device Vitals: Connected devices yield enterprises a wide range of opportunities – as well as potential risks. More than ever, organizations must identify new ways to monitor and manage these devices after initial deployment. Memfault addresses this need and utilized the show to demonstrate the capabilities of its recently released Device Vitals solution. This solution offers plug‑and‑play visibility into IoT fleet firmware stability, battery life, and connectivity. The company also hinted towards a 2024 initiative to become more active in the security space, highlighting the synergies between offering its device reliability engineering (DRE) monitoring solutions alongside device security services.

Image: Example Dashboards for Memfault Device Vitals

Read VDC’s full write‑up on Embedded World 2024, including major trends and topics of our various conversations as well as other critical corporate and product announcements, is available here.