This year, the leading exhibition and conference event Embedded World drew over 1,100 exhibitors and ground-breaking 32,000 visitors to Nuremberg, Germany. The massive event has taken its place as the go-to venue for the global embedded community to meet, network and showcase products, solutions and innovations.
Unikie’s team attended the event together with our partner CoreHW, giving live demonstrations of accurate, cost-efficient asset tracking utilizing Real-Time Location System technology.
What were the main trends that stood out at the three-day event chock-full of industry leaders, top innovators and brand new solutions?
From our perspective, the things you should have on your radar are the rising demand for bundled software and hardware solutions, Edge AI computing and the importance of both software and hardware in security.
Let’s take a quick look at these trends!
Customers demand complete HW and SW solutions
Today, companies building embedded solutions are more and more demanding ready-made software on top of hardware. Chip manufacturers build excellent, high-performance hardware but software is playing an increasing role in the final product.
However, customers do not want to invest time and effort into their own, in-house software development. At the same time, chip manufacturers want to keep their eye on the ball and focus on their hardware development roadmaps.
Based on the talk at the event, the sought-after solution for this is a partnering model, where software service providers work together with chip manufacturers and end customers to build tailored solutions combining HW and SW. The key to success here is for the SW vendor to both know the hardware and SDKs really well AND understand the end customer’s business goals.
If you’re looking for a software partner, take a look at Unikie’s software development services.
Intelligence comes down from the cloud
Another hot topic was the transition from cloud-based computing to Edge AI. Many hardware manufacturers showcased products with AI acceleration and machine learning features. A clear trend is to process data locally, at the hardware level, instead of pushing all possible data to the cloud.
Processing locally comes with many benefits. The data can be utilized in real-time, within just milliseconds, improving the reaction times to sensor events, for example. On top of this, on-device processing saves energy and resources as all raw data is not pushed to the cloud. This also contributes to the global trend of sustainable development.
Naturally, the cloud is not dead – far from it. Instead of all raw data, the local layer now pushes meaningful, enriched data to the cloud for further utilization.
At Unikie, we firmly believe that businesses can make better decisions by utilizing AI and ML.
Security needs both hardware and software solutions
As IoT devices are becoming increasingly software-defined, the potential cyber attack surface increases compared to traditional hardware defined products. In addition, the scaled-down nature of IoT device hardware means that rigid software cybersecurity features are difficult to implement and are often missing by default.
As a solution, a mix of robust hardware-rooted security and added flexible software-based security solutions are needed to build proper cyber security for IoT devices.
Luckily, chip manufacturers provide excellent tools for building hardware-based security solutions. It is up to the software developers to actually make use of these tools and to integrate software defined security solutions like over-the-air firmware updates and device certificate provisioning solutions.
Building security starts by having a full understanding of all types of potential security risks.
Warm reception to Unikie’s asset tracking solution
Together with our partner CoreHW, we got to showcase our joint accurate asset tracking solution designed for various types of spaces, such as warehouses and stores. Based on Real-Time Location System (RTLS) technology, the solution provides accuracy of 10 cm (3.94 in.), robust security, flexibility and easy installation.
The people we met appreciated seeing the solution in action. Based on the discussions we had, utilizing Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) as the communication technology between tags and locators was considered a superior solution over traditional Bluetooth and UWB: legacy Bluetooth has inferior accuracy and UWB often empties the tag batteries far too early.
All in all, we thoroughly enjoyed Embedded World 2024 – it’s always great to meet customers, partners and colleagues live and in person. See you next time!
See our highlights from embedded world 2024:
