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EE Times Europe
At last week’s Hardware Pioneers Max, EE Times Europe caught up with electronics, embedded systems and IoT connectivity experts at 360 Compliance, Taoglas, u-blox, Crypto Quantique, Wireless Logic, Eseye, Polyn Technology, Elimo Engineering and Embedd.it.
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Hardware Pioneers Max, an annual single-day exhibition-focused event held in London, is fast becoming a popular draw on the European IoT and electronics industry’s event calendar. First held in 2021 and pitched as the event where electronics, embedded systems and IoT connectivity converge, the “Max” exhibition builds on the Hardware Pioneers evening conference series, which commenced in London in 2014 and later expanded into Germany and the U.S. This year’s Max drew exhibitors from China, the U.S., and Japan, establishing it as an international event.
EE Times Europe caught up with Hardware Pioneers Max co-founder and director Fabiano Bellisario during the show to learn about the event’s evolution to date and its planned direction for the future. “Since 2021, we’ve had good numbers of exhibitors that keep coming back,” said Bellisario. “They continue to trust us, and word is spreading about how successful the show is. We focus on connecting people across the industry so they can have meaningful conversations, essentially connecting the exhibitors with the right audience.”
The exhibition floor was bustling throughout the day, and there was standing room only at many of the two companion conference streams’ sessions. The event hosted 80 exhibitors and roughly 2,000 registered visitors this year. “For 2024, we’re keeping the same venue but moving to a much larger exhibition area to accommodate 100-plus exhibitors and an even larger audience, and making it a one-and-a-half-day show,” Bellisario told EE Times Europe.
The event covers the full scope of developing, manufacturing and operating an IoT device. The show appeals to a broad engineering audience, from those with an idea for a product but needing more skills to design it to developers facing specific technical challenges. Conversations with exhibitors made it clear that bringing an IoT device to market requires a plethora of skill sets, and even the most experienced embedded development team will need to call on experts to help them with certain aspects of their design.
The two conference streams provided a total of 20 presentations covering a mix of technical topics, such as ultra-low power AI at the edge, how to select sensors for condition-monitoring applications and implementing wireless connectivity. Here is a roundup of key topics that caught our attention at the show.
Achieving conformance to regional and national safety standards often confuses device manufacturers, requiring specialist support for tasks such as functional safety, EMC/EMI, electrical safety, and RF and wireless approvals. “Compliance is often a last-minute decision for many development teams—something that they try to avoid rather than something they have to face,” Nativ Or, CEO of 360 Compliance (Binyamina-Giv’at Ada, Israel), told EE Times Europe. He encouraged engineering teams to tackle the topic early in the design process to avoid unnecessary costs and significant rework later in the project.
Or said his company offers a turnkey “regulatory testing from start to certificate” service. He stressed the importance of pre-compliance testing and establishing synergy between design and compliance throughout a project’s life.
Demonstrating the benefits that collaboration brings to the end user, David Connolly, director of product marketing at Taoglas (Dublin, Ireland), described the company’s cooperation with u-blox (Thalwil, Switzerland) to design a highly integrated, high-precision GNSS module. “The low-power EL20 module incorporates a Taoglas Edge Locate Smart Antenna and a u-blox ZED-F9P module with Multiband RTK [real-time kinematic] to enable centimeter-level positioning,” he told us. “Our active antenna covers the GNSS L1/L2/E5b/B2b bands.”
Connolly said the collaborators had recognized that customers need help with antenna integration, so the module offers an easy-to-integrate approach that speeds time to market for applications requiring high-precision positioning, such as robotic lawnmowers and smart agricultural machinery. Speaking generally about wireless designs, Connolly recommended “integrating the antenna into the design at an early stage as a way of speeding up the development to get to market quickly.”
Neil Hamilton, head of growth at u-blox, spoke with us about the company’s cooperation with Taoglas. There has been “a lot more collaboration across our industry,” he said, as developers start projects only to encounter “challenges and compromises suddenly. There is much learning on the fly, so collaboration speeds up innovation. You can’t be an expert in everything, so cooperation adds skills and experience.” He explained that the u-blox Point Perfect subscription service works with the EL20 module and briefly discussed establishing the business case for asset tracking. He highlighted that an asset tracker should cost no more than 1% of the asset’s value.
Crypto Quantique (London) was among the exhibitors that focus on securing embedded systems. “People are much more aware now that they must solve the security problem,” said director of applications Chris Jones. “You can’t be good enough in security, so we advocate [taking] the best approach rather than accepting anything less. From the Crypto Quantique perspective, end-to-end security starts at the chip level.”
Jones and colleague Keith Bramley gave a presentation on the challenges of the forthcoming E.U., U.K. and U.S. security legislation, cited the 20-plus countries currently introducing IoT security regulations and outlined best practices and solutions to achieve compliance.
Several wireless connectivity product suppliers and service providers exhibited at the show. Iain Davidson, senior product manager at virtual cellular network IoT connectivity provider Wireless Logic (Maidenhead, U.K.), spoke with us about the company’s range of global SIM and e-SIM 5G, LTE-M, NBIoT and LPWAN connectivity, security and IoT device management services. Davidson noted that more network operators are beginning to restrict roaming capabilities and warned of the impact on global connectivity.
Paul Marshall, co-founder of wireless connectivity provider Eseye (Guildford, U.K.), cited the need for more localization as some mobile network operators (MNOs) restrict IoT devices from roaming, which leads to increased connectivity complexity. “There is an element of maturity when talking to embedded developers about how device connectivity is delivered, with some customers very focused on connection reliability,” Marshall told EE Times Europe. “Also, there are different attitudes to using a hybrid connectivity approach,” as “more connectivity equates to more cost,” which may be untenable for some applications.
Marshall also broached the topic of data sovereignty, commenting, “Some countries are now passing legislation that stipulates any data collected within that nation is kept there. This introduces the need to be able to prove it, requiring the customer to conduct due diligence that it is complying with the legislation.”
Many exhibitors discussed low-power design implementation, approaching the topic from the perspectives of embedded application development, selecting sensor technologies, and monitoring a system’s behavior and power consumption profile.
Aleksandr Timofeev, CEO of Polyn Technology (Caesarea, Israel), gave a presentation on achieving ultra-low–power preprocessing of sensor data using the company’s neuromorphic analog signal processing (NASP) front-end IC. “For some sensor applications, 99% of the signal is noise, so preprocessing the data at the edge rather than sending it to the cloud makes sense,” he told EE Times Europe. “Our NASP IC opens the opportunity for a new generation of sensor nodes for real-time AI applications at the edge.”
Placed after the sensor, the NASP IC processes the raw data and sends only useful data onward. Timofeev stated that the flow of data transmitted is reduced by a factor of a thousand and that the IC’s power consumption is less than 100 microwatts.
Another presentation on low power was given by Matteo Scordino, co-founder of Elimo Engineering. Scordino’s presentation provided insights into some of the techniques and tools embedded developers can use to achieve a low-power design but also suggested that sometimes it’s impossible, stating, “As in many engineering situations, you need to conduct a cost/benefit analysis for low-power design. There will always be tradeoffs between low-power design and the bill of materials.
“Sometimes, if you get within, say, 10% of your [power consumption] goal, squeezing the last microamp out of it might not be worth it except in extreme cases,” he added. “Device usage, battery aging and chemistry variations all have an influence.”
With the current interest in machine learning, it was only a matter of time before its abilities would be turned toward speeding up embedded development. Michael Lazarenko, CEO of startup Embedd.it (London, U.K.), spoke to EE Times Europe about how his company uses machine learning to develop device drivers for semiconductor ICs.
“In the future, we believe that the embedded developer won’t need to worry about how the underlying hardware functions,” Lazarenko observed. “They won’t need to worry about a particular mode, configurations or how registers in interfaces function. Those interfacing tasks are very manually oriented, and the language of communication between the semiconductor manufacturer and the embedded software developer has been a PDF document for a long time. With the advances in machine learning, we saw an opportunity to structure and understand the PDF data to the point that we can use proven code generation technologies to abstract from the hardware and help developers integrate new semiconductors into the firmware.”
Lazarenko said the system works “by ingesting the component PDF datasheet to extract essential information such as charts, tables and graphs to format it in a specific way to generate a large language model. A structured and editable device driver is generated from this, which provides high-level functions. Rather than going through hundreds of pages of the data sheet, the developer gets a digital component model, for say, a light sensor.”
A common theme in the interviews with exhibitors and speakers at the event was that all recommended developers seek expert advice early in the design process. The nature of the support required will vary according to the project’s specifications and the skills of the team but could cover antenna selection and placement, achieving regulatory and statutory compliance or selecting a global wireless connectivity provider. The benefits of adopting this approach include accelerating time to market and avoiding unanticipated nonrecoverable engineering costs.
Read also:
Startups Help RISC-V Reshape Computer Architecture
Robert Huntley is a contributor for EE Times Europe.
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