embedded award 2023: Start-up nominees
Young companies are driving technological development. The start-up scene in the embedded industry is correspondingly lively. Reason enough to dedicate a separate category to start-ups at the embedded award. Take a look at the future of the industry …
Predictive maintenance radar sensing, indoor light energy harvesting and a RISC-V instruction set simulator
A4Radar Sensors allow digital transformation processesPredictive Maintenance Radar Sensing
Exhibitor: Advanced Algorithms 4 Radar, SL
Hall/Booth: 2/2-521
Globalization and competitiveness are forcing companies to rethink and to innovate their production processes. It means using new production technology, new machinery, new materials, and new inputs. The industry is undergoing transformation and evolution toward complete digitization, applying the intelligence of production processes to ensure high efficiency and increase quality. We are in the fourth industrial revolution where knowledge has become a crucial input.
A4Radar Sensors allow digital transformation processes, connecting man and technology to improve efficiency and increasing productivity to optimize management on collaborative value chains, becoming factories in highly connected entities, with different sensors being able to interact with one another and adjust asset performances.
A4Radar Industrial Solutions drive autonomous and highly cognitive ecosystem, providing radar-based sensors that enable the collection of data for learning systems and automatic decision making with acquisition and processing in real time to reliably detect moving or stationary targets, enable manufacturers to rapidly respond to shifting environment, adapting their resources, turning processes more efficient and profitable.
Radar Systems proposed are optimized for high accuracy and ultra-low power, delivered as one package solution, will enable easy integration as a sensor into any customer application or as a stand-alone module, providing robust performance against interferences.
The development of millimetre-wave UWB radars with real-time acquisition and processing has a recent history and is beginning to gain ground in the new non-contact precision sensing, given the advances in the integration of SoC solutions for large production volumes and contained costs.
High resolution radar systems are capable of monitoring and detecting situations of improper operation or breakdown, by non-contact sensing in real time of vibrations and displacement of parts and systems, generating alarms that allow optimization and prevention of failures, detecting structural health of the element under supervision.
A4Radar is made up of a multidisciplinary engineering team, with a large experience in multinational companies form R&D engineering to Business Management with a unique blend of expertise in Radar Systems, Embedded Real Time Signal Processing, Radiofrequency Design and Industrial Development, being able to provide engineering support from concept to final stages throughout algorithm creation and industrialization of new products, allowing quickly prototyping and a reduced time to market for new radar solutions in different applications.
This product is now possible due to the reduced costs that radar transceivers have achieved over the last few years, as well as a much smaller form factor due to the higher working frequency bands and lower manufacturing cost of ASICs.
Epishine OneCell
Exhibitor: Epishine AB
Hall/Booth: 2-525
Currently the majority of all sensors, IOT devices and low-power electronics are powered by disposable batteries. This causes a huge negative impact on the environment, every year about 200 thousand tons of disposable batteries are used in the EU alone and only half is recycled, the rest is landfill. Disposable batteries also bring a high total cost of maintenance of the devices since the batteries need to be replaced frequently. Considering the rapid digitalization of our society this means a huge increasing number of batteries that needs to be replaced.
Energy harvesting can be the solution to the issues with disposable batteries. However, a harvesting method with high performance is required. This enables a straightforward design process and integration into the product it is supposed to power. The problem is particularly difficult for products with complex shapes and where design is important especially for consumer electronics.
The area that can be used for energy harvesting is often limited by design choices such as form factor, indicators, or buttons. Since the energy that can be harvested is limited, the harvesting method must have a high performance and should not be limited by its form factor or design to enable maximum energy harvested.
The Epishine OneCell is an organic solar cell tuned to indoor light with world leading light energy harvesting performance, efficiently converting light to electricity even at very low illumination. The OneCell is a sustainable method for powering small wireless electronics. With a flexible design that can be adapted to intricate and customized layouts to meet specific surface finishes of the product, for example, soft touch plastics, leather, brushed etc.
The unique composition of the OneCell enables cut-outs in the surface without limiting the performance, which allows new light powered applications like remote-controls or Property Tech controllers. With world leading light harvesting performance the need for disposable batteries is eliminated. Resulting in a much more sustainable solution and with an immensely reduced total cost of ownership. Our solar cells are produced in a roll-to-roll process which is the most efficient way to large scale production of solar cells.
The product is available today as engineering samples and in pre-series production later this year.
SIM-V
Exhibitor: MachineWare GmbH
Hall/Booth: 4A/4A-620
Today, even small embedded systems are made up of different IP blocks from many vendors and execute complex software stacks consisting of millions of lines of code. This complexity leads to a high risk of software bugs and vulnerabilities that compromise the system’s security and safety. To detect these issues early in the design cycle, full system simulators based on the SystemC standard, so called Virtual Platforms (VPs), are the preferred tool.
Unfortunately, high target system complexity usually leads to reduced VP simulation performance. Contemporary VPs often fail to deliver the performance required for executing realistic workloads within reasonable time frames.
During embedded software development this is especially problematic, as it requires close to real time feedback from the simulation. In Continuous Integration (CI) scenarios, slow VPs prohibit testing of every commit, and often only a daily CI run is possible, making it hard to pinpoint which exact change introduced the faulty behavior. To alleviate these problems we provide SIM-V, a novel SystemC TLM-2.0 based RISC-V instruction set simulator for early software development and verification.
SIM-V, MachineWare´s flagship product, combines unprecedented simulation performance with exceptional customizability for applications ranging from the tiniest embedded devices to warehouse-scale supercomputers. SIM-V enables software developers to test full software stacks – including firmware, operating system kernel and complex user-space applications, such as Java virtual machines or rich graphical environments – in real time.
In particular, SIM-V addresses the need for high-performance RISC-V Loosely-Timed SystemC VPs. It is based on MachineWare´s novel Just-In-Time compilation engine FTL (Fast Translator Library), enabling ultra-high simulation performance, e.g. outperforming the current de facto industry standard QEMU by 2x. FTL has been explicitly designed with SystemC TLM-2.0 in mind for easy integration into existing simulation environments.
Furthermore, SIM-V is parallelizable, allowing the SystemC TLM-2.0 standard compliant simulation of multiple RISC-V processors on multiple host processor cores. By integrating the FTL-based RISC-V processor model into MachineWare´s open-source Virtual Components Modeling Library (VCML), deep introspection and instrumentation in Python is enabled, as well as TLM transaction tracing, debugging with GDB, and VP control through a GUI.
