AI is good, but its real value lies in the Edge

Science-fiction film directors often sketch futuristic worlds with self-driving cars, talking robots, and advanced medical facilities. With artificial intelligence (AI) becoming commonplace, we’re closer than ever to reaching this future vision, especially if AI operates at the edge. Embedded World ‘24 focused on the future of Edge AI and its challenges. Edge AI enhances new embedded systems by bringing advanced processing and decision-making capabilities directly into products, reducing reliance on cloud solutions.

AMD-Xilinx identifies key Edge AI challenges: power, throughput, latency, accuracy, environmental interaction, safety, security, workloads, and regulation. Companies address these using low-power chips, energy harvesting methods, Edge AI processors, communication modules able to meet throughput and latency requirements, new time of flight sensors, security devices, etc.

Edge AI empowers embedded systems to operate more autonomously, efficiently and securely. Today’s technology enables Verhaert to integrate Edge AI in new cost-effective products, promising a revolution in the industry, home automation, medical, and automotive sectors.

The EU Cyber Resilience Act and its effect on new products

The European Parliament’s approval of the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) in March ’24 marks a significant step in addressing the security of digital products throughout their lifespan, notably impacting the development of new embedded systems. However, the practical implementation of the law remains uncertain. For sure, manufacturers are prohibited from consciously bringing insecure products on the market. Responsibility is extended across the entire value chain, except for open-source developers, who cannot be held liable for security breaches in their code. To protect the open-source world, the responsibility for potential security leaks lies with the companies using the open-source code.

To navigate the CRA effectively, it’s imperative to incorporate security features into your product design early on. A more security-focused approach in embedded systems development includes: secure coding, data encryption, access control, and vulnerability management. Continuous monitoring and updates are essential to mitigate emerging cyber threats.

Comprehensive documentation, including a general security process, specific features, potential vulnerabilities for each product version, and a hardware and software Bill of Materials (BOM) with security risk assessments, ensures clarity and compliance. Thorough preparation before product launch is key, as severe penalties await those who neglect security. The software lifecycle now requires heightened attention, with bug-free software no longer being sufficient.

Bluetooth is much more than communication

As Bluetooth’s Low Energy version advances, it’s crucial to understand its application-level distinctions and integration benefits. The main innovations are:

• Channel sounding in Bluetooth 5, employing time flight or phase-based running for 10 cm accuracy in localization and tracking.
• Enhanced Bluetooth 5 LE audio offers multichannel streaming and improved sound quality with new audio codec, higher data rates, and increased payload per package.
• Bluetooth 5 introduces Periodic Advertisement with Responses (PaWR) for secure communication with electronic shelf labels in warehouse settings, extending battery life through ultra-low power consumption.

These innovations showcase Bluetooth’s versatility, expanding beyond its conventional services. Channel sounding replaces GPS for indoor localization, enhancing cost-effectiveness through a widely adopted protocol. LE audio enriches user experiences with improved performance and music sharing, while PaWR prioritizes ultra-low power consumption. Bluetooth’s readiness to evolve ensures its prominent role in IoT communications.

Together toward a smart, sustainable and secure future

From AI that’s smarter at the edge to Bluetooth’s indoor magic, music sharing and efficiency! And let’s not forget the EU’s new security-first Cyber Resilience Act: embed, comply, update, navigate. So as embedded systems move to smart, sustainable, secure future features, it’s time to understand what added value you’ll be able to create for your customers. We’re on the edge of a great opportunity!

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At Verhaert we are helping our customers to innovate and develop their product portfolio. We have designed and developed more than 1000 products since 1969. Bringing a product to market is not a walk in the park and involves many aspects. One of these aspects is arranging the supply chains delivering the right components at the right time to be able to assemble the electronic boards in your product.

Due to global material and component shortage, specific electronic components can be very hard to come by these days. This situation introduces an extra risk in the product development cycle that must be handled.

The effect of component shortage

Like every other business, we at Verhaert also got affected by the events that happened around us and the rest of the world. Not being able to source desired and necessary components for development can lead to market introduction delays, possibly missing a window of opportunity. In production however, this may very well lead to a complete production stop, with potential customers moving towards your competitors. Multiple examples exist of companies that have products on the market for years, where the production has halted from one day to another, because they cannot source $ 0.3 components. Also the launch of new products is accompanied with a struggle to ramp up the production. Everyone ordering a new (electric) car, or e.g. a PlayStation 5, will know the problem.

It is generally known that the cost of change rises exponentially with the made development progress. It is not worthwhile tackle product risks such as feasibility late in the development process. If you know sooner that a concept can’t work, you will have lost less money on this concept. This means that the size of the changes normally reduces with the progress that you make. This is illustrated in the figure below.

Figure 1: The further the product is in the development, the more difficult it is to change fundamental parts

Now what is the effect of component shortage on this product development process? The component shortage is an unexpected occurrence, striking beyond your control, that forces you to perform such an undesirable design change. This leads you to take a step back in the development cycle, resulting in a higher cost and longer timing, and can even lead to a full stop in production. As component shortage may occur at any moment within the product design phase – and even when the product is on the market – and in any part of your product, this is to be treated as a project risk with a reasonable occurrence rate and a high severity level.

How can we deal with this project risk?

In the process of bringing to and keeping a product on the market, we deal with project risks, and this is no exception to this. How can this (partially) be mitigated? During the previous years, we encountered some component shortage difficulties, and devised some methods to deal with these. The application of each of these possibilities depends on the development phase the product is in and on the envisaged production size. In the remainder of this perspective, these risk mitigation possibilities will be explained, and some practical examples are given for clarification.

1. Risk analysis

The first step when dealing with risks is to make a risk analysis. During the phases where technologies, parts and components are selected, a component shortage risk analysis needs to be made. During this risk analysis, we indicate where there can be a possible problems in lead time and unavailability. This seems to be a lot of work, but this is actually an extension on the exercise to find if there are multiple suppliers for the same component.

How do we tackle this in practice? We perform a risk analysis to find multiple suppliers and add the regular lead time to the equation. For components where we see little alternatives, and with large lead times, it may be better to change this circuit. During the initial development phases it is the ‘easiest’ to change the implementation. The further in the development process, the more difficult this becomes.

It often happens that some parts seem ideal for the specific needs of a product. This also was the case in one of our projects. The lead time was more than one year however. This was the reason why alternatives were found and adjustments were made in the production prototype phase. This resulted in a more robust circuit from component shortage point-of-view.

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What is 5G?

5G is the next generation wireless communication technology standard for cellular networks. 4G was mainly an introduction of mobile broadband communication, leading i.a. to mobile video applications. Its main goal was to provide broadband Internet to people everywhere. 5G however, is all about machines.

Figure 1: 5G frequency spectrum (source: NI)

5G is designed with the creation of a mobile ecosystem in mind, providing the means to fulfill new opportunities in a broad range of industries. The challenges are versatile. There are much more machines than humans. Furthermore, they can respond faster and energy consumption is a main issue. To tackle these requirements, the design know-how and required leap from 4G to 5G is very large and unprecedented.

5G frequency spectrum

While the focus in this perspective is not on providing detailed technical information about 5G, one major change has a key influence on communication behavior and product design: the frequency spectrum. 3 bands have been allocated globally and are auctioned in many regions:

• Low Frequency below 2GHz. Currently the focus is on 600-700 MHz (band 71 and 82). It’s the best possible spectrum for fast coverage penetration. However, as very precious and limited spectrum resource, they can only offer limited connections. Therefore, we cannot expect full-fledged 5G operating in this band.
• Medium Frequency range 2-6 GHz (sub 6 GHz). A new 5G spectrum which is the best frequency range to offer both coverage and capacity. This means that while penetration into buildings is possible, frequency reuse can be well planned.
• mmWave Frequency range (>26 GHz). The spectrum for denser populated areas with a higher capacity, which offers a greater freedom and more range to maneuver, in addition to less background noise. It’s excellent for providing capacity and offering extremely high data rates to specific use cases.

As each of these bands has a specific RF communication behavior, there’s a big influence on usage and design considerations to be taken into account.

Figure 2: Allocated spectrum per region (source: EDN)

Is 5G just a faster version of 4G?

The enormous amount of spectral range allocated to 5G points to an increase in communication bandwidth. Is 5G essentially just a faster version of 4G? The answer is no. The main benefits of 5G are to be found in multiple domains.

Figure 3: 4G vs. 5G (source: Western Digital)

The benefits of 5G can mainly be found in a higher bandwidth, a much lower latency with peak rates below 1ms, a much lower energy consumption from which battery driven mobile devices will benefit, and communication up to 1M devices per square km.

mmWaves you say?

The 5G specifications pose many challenges, of which the use of mmWaves is completely new. mmWave communication is a type of RF communication where line of sight (LoS) becomes a major factor. This means that the waves have a limited penetration depth, so buildings, trees and even rain decrease the link budget significantly. Base stations will likely offer up to 500 meter coverage, taking into account obstacles and foliage. This is obviously not a huge area, but this doesn’t mean it’s useless. Next to a broadband point-to-point connection, which mmWaves are ideally suited for, the above 26GHz range will probably only be used in urban centers or other places where a maximum number of consumers can be covered in a small space.

4G dead and buried?

5G is a new technology, its properties completely comprising the benefits of 4G. However, this doesn’t mean that 4G is dead and buried. 4G stays a valid alternative in case a broadband communication link is needed, as it doesn’t cope with the 5G challenges. Furthermore, it will stay for the years to come. 5G is just an extra, powerful possibility in the wireless communication technology selection that needs to be made during product design.

5G as a market enabler

As we explained earlier, 5G is all about machines. It mostly targets Internet of Things (IoT) as new market segment. The main benefits of 5G can be found in areas where other cellular technologies can’t follow, i.e. low latency in combination with high bandwidth.

Figure 4: 5G as a market enabler (source: Atlantik Elektronik)

Once 5G becomes widely adopted, we could see progress in areas that either consume or generate lots of data in real-time. These applications often combine 5G with Artificial Intelligence. Possible applications are in autonomous vehicles and robotics, augmented and virtual reality, Internet of context, predictive modeling, smart cities, factories and homes … It’s believed that 5G will play a major role in this.

5G roll-out

It was stated earlier that the leap from 4G to 5G is very large and unprecedented. This means that during the 5G roll-out, network operators are using a stepped approach.

Figure 5: Estimated roll-out scheme per region (source: Qualcomm)

The first step is adapting the existing 4G network to facilitate 5G in a non-standalone system (NSA). The advantage is that the construction speed is very fast. This allows users to experience the advantages of 5G network as soon as possible. This means that most of the base stations that are currently deployed by operators are NSA base stations.

Figure 6: Standalone vs. non-standalone 5G system (source:Gearbest)

For a complete standalone system (SA), operators need to rebuild 5G base stations and upgrade the equipment of the 5G core network. This is required to fully realize all the characteristics and functions of 5G network. But because all base stations and infrastructure need to be rebuilt, the cost of construction is quite high. Moreover, it takes a long time to migrate from 4G network to 5G core network. Reports predict that only in late 2021 SA networks will become available on prime locations in Europe.

Some people may ask if there’ll be a difference in terms of user experience, given the cost of NSA- and SA-systems. There won’t be much difference between the 2 in terms of speed and latency, NSA will be the 5G mainstream solution for the coming years.

No free lunch

For a large group of products or new product ideas, 5G has very attractive benefits. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Where the network operators need to bridge the gap towards 5G, for the product designer integrating this communication technology, 5G also poses many challenges. Verhaert’s EmbeddedLab aims to smooth things out for you. In the next parts, we provide more info on topics requiring extra attention.

Cutting edge technology

At the moment of writing, multiple chip manufacturers already have 5G chip sets ready and are broadening their portfolio to keep up with the 5G network evolutions. The most important manufacturers are Huawei, Qualcomm, Samsung and Mediatek. The same can be told about module manufacturers. Among others, Quectel, Sierra Wireless and Telit currently have chip sets from the earlier mentioned manufacturers embedded on their modules. This means that it’s already possible to incorporate 5G in your product! However, using cutting edge technology has its drawbacks. Early technology adoption inevitably brings implementation challenges such as immature embedded software stacks, which have their influence on budget and timing. Still, this is often an acceptable cost when compared to a longer time-to-market.

RF engineering & antenna design

Each new wireless communication technology has its specific RF design challenges. Due to the large frequency spectrum and introduction of mmWaves, massive MIMO and beamsteering however, the hardware design complexity is much higher for 5G in comparison to other cellular technologies. This makes that the inputs from an RF engineer during the design of a 5G connected product are invaluable.

There are various aspects that need to be taken into account. One example is the influence of printed circuit board (PCB) material. FR4 is the board material used in almost every electronics design. It’s a low cost material, and performs well enough for everyday electronics. In the GHz range however, this material has a very high attenuation, making this design a challenge.

Figure 7: Board material attenuation vs. frequency (source: Intel)

So how to integrate a 5G module inside a product? Not only the 5G module itself, but also the implementation of the surrounding product becomes important. This is done by providing a good layout, shielding topology, resonance omitting measures, up to the mechanical design of the product itself. When it comes to designing a 5G compatible PCB, knowledge is key. Not necessarily the abundance of information, but having the right information counts.

For many UHF, SHF and EHF applications, an abundance of information is present. A broad range of specific topics are covered, but in contrast to UHF, little general layout guidelines are known for SHF and EHF. Information is detailed but widely dispersed amongst many different topics. Many of the guidelines applicable for UHF applications fail at higher frequencies such as the SHF and EHF bands as the wavelengths shortens and ordinary precautions prove inadequate. An example of such a design rule of thumb is via stitching between planes with an interval of 1/20 to 1/10 of the minimal on-board wavelength that can be expected. As the wavelength of e.g. 3.5 GHz is 43 mm on FR4, stitching vias should occur near the transceiver with an interval of 2.1 to 4.3 mm.

It’s clear that this frequency lies in the zone in which this rule of thumb stops to be practically usable. But this reasoning shows that the need for concise guidelines for frequencies above the UHF band exists and grows with the global release of 5G as the next generation of wireless communication. The insights of RF engineers will therefore be invaluable for the introduction of 5G in new products.

The same thing can be told about antenna design. Design of a broadband antenna is a specialty itself. Going to mmWaves however, this task becomes more challenging, as at these frequencies effects of the transceiver front-end come into play.

Figure 8: mmWave antenna (source: Taoglas)

Although the first 5G antennas are becoming available for sub-6-GHz as well as the mmWave range, it’s vital to take an extra look at the front-end combination as well as the positioning in the product. Not your cup of tea? Let’s guide you through this adventure.

EMC aspects

The complex integration of a 5G transceiver system into a product requires special attention. One of the critical effects to take into account is: self-interference. On one hand, there’s the computer system collaborating with such a high bandwidth communication system. This is expected to be an AI processing unit. To reach the required processing speed, a very fast transistor technology is used. Not only is the input capacitance much lower to be able to make the rise and fall in tens of picoseconds, providing an input bandwidth surpassing the sub-6 GHz 5G frequency band (e.g. PCI express). Furthermore, the supply voltage level of these chip sets is low, making them more susceptible to interference.

But no interference without receiving antenna. The 5G transmission frequency range is higher than in case of other commonly used wireless communication techniques. This means that a nearby transmitter is able to excite shorter structures. At this point, the mainly used dedicated 5G frequency is 3.5 GHz. This has a wavelength of 43 mm on FR4. This means that a trace of (multiples of) about 1 cm can become a great reception antenna. These are commonly used trace lengths on a regular PCB. And the susceptibility will further increase once the transmission frequency range broadens. A shielding approach needs to be defined.

And then there is the test problem. The radiated immunity test frequency range is currently defined by the product type and the operating frequency of the device-under-test. The standard radiated immunity test range is limited to 1 GHz. For higher frequency devices, an extension is made up to 6 GHz. This means that lots of devices have not been subjected to the higher cellular frequencies and their harmonics. This means that it’s unknown if unsafe situations can occur when a 5G transceiver is placed in the vicinity of a device. While it could be expected that a system not operating in the 5G operating range is immune against EMI, this is not the case. This means that to be able to bring a safe product on the market, the EMC test landscape will need to change in the coming years.

Interesting times

At the beginning of this perspective, a completely connected world was drawn on the horizon. Various manufacturers from different markets are working together to realize this. 3GPP and network operators are bringing the next building block: 5G, a wireless communication technology with the potential to open up new markets for anyone seeing the opportunity. And yes, each new technology comes with a few challenges that in hindsight will prove to be not as insurmountable as initially foretold. We’re living in interesting times, in which we, as Verhaert EmbeddedLab, are happy to participate.

Sources: raconteur.net – datamakespossible.westerndigital.com – verizonwireless.com – ni.com – androidauthority.com – tutorialspoint.com – qualcomm.com – taoglas.com – quectel.com – atlantikelektronik.de – edn.com – gearbest.com – intel.com – electronic.se

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Sensors and technological trends go hand in hand. Sensors and metrology are key in driving technological innovation of today. Industry 4.0, IoT, Smart Mobility, autonomous driving, Smart Energy, Smart City, condition monitoring or industrial automation, in these industries sensors are becoming ubiquitous and connected.

But what is a sensor anyway?

Back then a sensor was just a component producing an electrical signal from a physical value. Easy no? Nowadays, even simple sensors have evolved into intelligent systems with self-calibration, self-control, digitization, signal processing and digital interfaces or even on-board data logging. Today, digital parameter and values indicating an anomaly are transmitted to remote surveillance centers. The next big thing is a smart autonomous sensor system. Here, next to the registration of one or more measured variables, the entire signal processing and power provisioning or even energy harvesting is incorporated in one housing.

Typically, these smart sensors include a microprocessor with communication interfaces that provide connectivity to other sensors (sensor mesh network) or to a central system (locally or in the cloud). This way, the sensor is able to identify and extract complex, application-specific, useful information from one or more physical property data streams. Thus, sophisticated tasks can be achieved by the sensor without an external computer. And with this, the demand for smaller, decentralized, more reliable, cheaper and more flexible systems can be achieved. But these requirements are never entirely fulfilled and there are future sensor-generations to come which are even better, smaller, smarter, cheaper and more autonomous.

Smart sensors widen the value chain

With smart sensors, we mean the intelligent combination of sensor data with other information. Be it the localization through GPS or WLAN or model-based knowledge about the process, so that sensors, along with algorithms, can already decide in the field, which incident needs to be reported. In parallel, the intelligent combination of various sensor data has increased importance. Smart autonomous sensor systems allow the users of these systems to widen their own services and offerings through to completely new offerings. In the future the co-operation within the entire supply chain becomes important. Next to smart sensors, new business models for smart services will become possible by utilizing intelligently data of products and manufacturing.

Envisioning new opportunities

With smart autonomous sensor systems, along with IoT, AI and cloud-based solutions new opportunities arise that only work when the supply chains or industries are connected. It becomes a matter of seeing the opportunities. A recently founded, inspiring place may be the IoT-Innovation space in Munich. This is a cooperation between Deutsche Telekom and IBM. Here it is demonstrated, how applications like smart parking, intelligent waste- and water-management, air quality control and predictive maintenance work. One example is sensor-generated air quality data that are aggregated and combined with weather-prediction-data and traffic-data. With this, users in the city council get insights about air quality and its dependencies and end users can get information about air quality via an app.

At Verhaert Masters in Innovation, one of our key competencies is to create smart technical solutions which fulfill the customer needs in an optimized way, which is not available off-the-shelf. To achieve this, we combine multiple disciplines like electronic design, software engineering, algorithm development, simulation, mechanical design and prototyping. Whilst developing these technical solutions, the user and business aspects are taken into account and new value chains are created.

Here are 3 examples of smart autonomous sensors.

1. Turbo speed sensor for TE Connectivity

Cars are everywhere around us, growing more performant, efficient and even autonomous. As an automotive part supplier, TE Connectivity is constantly reinventing its sensor portfolio to meet these automotive requirements. One of its new sensors is the turbo speed sensor. The turbo(charger) is a device used to recuperate the remaining energy in car exhaust gases and use this energy to pressurize the engine inlet air. This action is performed using a free-running turbine wheel, of which a maximum speed is not to be exceeded to prevent damage. To find and regulate to the optimum between inlet air pressure, wheel speed and engine performance, the speed of the turbo wheel needs to be measured. In regular cars however, no turbo speed sensor is available, and a high amount of margin is used to prevent this, as no assumptions can be made on the location (and especially the air pressure) of the car, leading to a suboptimal engine performance. The goal of this project is to improve the engine performance of all regular cars by making turbo speed sensors generally available. The turbo speed sensor performs this measurement and transfers the result to a car controller unit.

The sensor needs to meet the following requirements:

• The sensor needs to work from 0 rpm to 320 krpm of an aluminum or titanium turbo wheel. This corresponds to the turbo wheel speed of all existing cars. Especially the low rpm range would be an advantage when compared to the competition.
• As the automotive industry has high safety and reliability requirements, and the turbocharger environment is hostile to electronics, the temperature requirements were stringent and the sensor needs to comply with OBDII self-diagnostics. Especially the high temperature range mainly limits the component portfolio to passives, transistors and simple micro-controllers.
• Due to very high volumes, the cost and mass manufacturability were also very important factors.

Verhaert used its integrated product design approach (inverse the learning curve) to obtain a sensor solution meeting these challenging product requirements, with limited design effort. This trajectory started with a short study of the turbocharger environment and a sensor technology scouting. This scouting exercise resulted in a shortlist of rotational speed sensor principles, ranked based on earlier experience, applicability and technology readiness level. Examples are: inductive and mutual coupling, capacitive, acoustic, variable reluctance… This list was further reduced by performing simple tests ‘fail fast, learn fast’, indicating the validity of each of these measurement principles in this application. In the end, only the capacitive and inductive/mutual coupling approach remained.

For each of these, multiple implementations were made, consisting of a sensor head and driving electronics. Circuit- and PCB-design were used to optimize each electronics design, where 3D EM-field simulations were performed to design the sensor head. Each of these implementations was functionally tested in combination with a turbocharger, and was graded for each of the requirements.

This design approach resulted in a patented mutual coupling sensor implementation, which was not only highly effective but also lean, low power and low cost, as, after optimization, only 2 transistors, a few passives and a single micro-controller were used. As the sensor head needs two angled coils, which has a higher manufacturing cost compared to an inductive sensor head, the cost advantage is slightly reduced. Still, the high output signal quality, leading to low post processing requirements, reliability and versatility makes this sensor design able to cope with tomorrow’s challenges, both in automotive as well as in other industries.

2. Smart corrosion sensor for Resus

Corrosion is one of the main causes for failing heating systems. Constant monitoring and early detection of corrosion inside the heating pipes can give vital information on the system health, prevent system breakdown and avoid extensive repair costs.

Verhaert developed and optimized a sensor principle that’s able to measure the corrosion level. The sensor is mounted into the water flow via a T-coupler along the heating pipe circuit. The tip of the sensor contains a small, thin steel plate (approximately 100µm thick). The thickness of this plate is monitored through Eddy currents. The water in the heating pipe will corrode the thin plate, hence changing its thickness. By monitoring the change in thickness of the thin plate, a reliable prediction of the corrosion status of the whole water piping circuit can be made. This has been proven by extensive testing under various conditions. An advanced signal processing algorithm allows for a threshold to be set to give an early warning when corrosion level becomes a concern. This alarm triggers a contact or can be sent to a monitoring system.

Verhaert designed a unique, stable measurement system with low power consumption and long-time stability. Furthermore, we developed the mechanical parts and designed a hermetic seal that withstands the large temperature variations under higher pressure.

3. BOXX smart meter for Engie

As a leading energy provider, Engie is looking to offer their customers more added value via services. BOXX is a platform that allows end users to monitor and manage their energy consumption (gas, electricity, water). BOXX can be considered as an intelligent thermostat, but since it is a connected product, it can offer much more. In order for BOXX to work, it needs primary data input concerning energy consumption. For measuring electricity, Engie involved Verhaert to develop a sensor that could be retrofitted to the existing installed base of Ferraris meters (meter with turning disk). This type of meter is still the de-facto standard until it will be gradually replaced by intelligent meters in the coming 5 to 10 years. The list of requirements was very challenging:

• work with all types of Ferraris meters present in the field (>30 different types)
• non-invasive mounting on meter (meter cabinets are sealed)
• easy and quick install (with regard to current clamps)
• removable
• detect power consumption and production (for PV equipped home installations)
• very low cost
• work under all circumstances (dark, sunlight, artificial light)
• self-calibrating

Verhaert came up with a solution that is a smart autonomous sensor combination of optical technology (custom developed lens system, carefully selected led light source and modulation), analog signal interface and advanced signal processing. By tackling the job-to-be-done on different fronts concurrently, Verhaert was able to meet all requirements. The energy sensor is currently on the market with a steadily growing installed base. Customer feedback confirms that the sensor can be installed very easily and works reliable in almost every situation.

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