By Bolaji Ojo
As usual, the Embedded World Exhibition in Nuremberg, Germany, drew a large crowd of companies in the computing processor space. What was different at the March event this year was their focus. This time, it was all about artificial intelligence. No surprise about this, right? Except the majority of exhibitors at EW2025 were focused more on Edge AI, rather than on generic or cloud AI.
Microcontroller vendors and semiconductor IP companies led the group. Companies like Arm, Microchip, NXP, STMicroelectronics, MIPS, CEVA and others were in the throng, displaying and talking passionately about moving AI from the “talkshop” to the workshop. Despite massive travel disruptions, the event teemed with executives eager to display their companies’ Edge AI offerings. Arm spoke and demonstrated devices that showed its “early adoption of AI and edge computing,” as Paul Williamson, general manager, IoT line of business at the Cambridge, UK-based company told our editors during an interview.
“We’ve been looking at the evolution of AI for a long time,” Williamson said. “We’ve had to step up the tooling, the software and the computing elements because we’re seeing people move from convolutional networks to transformer networks and to vision-based solutions very quickly and they want to run all of those at the edge in embedded systems.”
It’s not a surprise that semiconductor suppliers in the microcontroller sector are diving deep into the Edge AI pool. They see massive opportunities in the billions of devices that are being rolled out with the capacity to process data locally rather than in the Cloud. The market for Edge AI is massive, ranging from automotive to aviation, industrial, medical and farming, according to industry executives. The devices are already deployed in many of these markets, they said, noting that the next waves of electronic equipment going into specialized manufacturing sectors are being fitted with Edge AI.
“Edge AI is a broad term,” said Sameer Watson, CEO of MIPS, in an interview. “Edge AI could be on an IoT device such as a camera or on robots and dishwashers. Think about a set of wide applications. We’re building technology that will make them better.”
He added: For MIPS, the common thing about all of these is that there is always going to be a moving part. And when you are moving things, there’s got to be three things. You must be precise; you must have low latency, and you have to be functionally safe. If we can build technology which does these three consistently with the right AI models and the right platform with the right RISC-V open-source architecture, you will help move this market.”
As in our 2024 edition of our Embedded Quest program, we asked some industry executives at the Embedded World Exhibition about their focus at the event and condensed their thoughts in the following video compilation. The executives we spoke with are from Arm, MIPS, CEVA and STMicroelectronics.
Click on the video below for short clips from the interviews.
Related articles:
Hot Stuff: Synaptics Astra SR-series Edge AI MCUs
NXP’s Sensing and Edge AI Play is More than Just About SDVs
Google and Synaptics Jointly Kick off 2025 Edge AI Race
Hot Stuff: Microchip AI Coding Assistant
Bolaji Ojo is publisher and managing editor of the Ojo-Yoshida Report. He can be reached at [email protected].
Copyright permission/reprint service of a full Ojo-Yoshida Report story is available for promotional use on your website, marketing materials and social media promotions. Please send us an email at [email protected] for details.