Taiwanese IoT company Advantech believes processors from Hailo could provide a lower cost way for companies to implement artificial intelligence (AI) at the edge.

Speaking at last week’s Electronica show in Munich, Thomas Kaminski, product sales director at Advantech, said Israeli company Hailo (hailo.ai) was strong on the vector processing unit (VPU) side, which fitted well into markets such as gaming, medical and retail.

“The combination of CPU and VPU is what makes AI at the edge,” he said. “I can combine Hailo with every business from us. You also need the right software, and Hailo has a software development kit to get that done.”

He acknowledged that Nvidia was the leader in AI and had built a lot of AI modules.

However, he said with Nvidia having CPU, GPU and VPU in one SoC (system on chip) meant those starting off were getting a lot of processing power they did not need.

“You may not need a GPU,” he said, “but with Nvidia you have it and are paying for it. Hailo is VPU only. There is a big price difference between Nvidia and Hailo.”

Kaminski pointed out that Advantech does have modules using Nvidia processors but said for many applications it provided more power than was needed.

His colleague Alexander Fritsch, product sales manager at Advantech (www.advantech.com), said with Nvidia (www.nvidia.com) you had a fixed environment that couldn’t be scaled.

“There is too much waste of power,” he said. “With Hailo, it is scalable. And the company guarantees long-term supply and is fully industry certified.”

An example of an Advantech product using Hailo processors is the Air-150 (advdownload.advantech.com/productfile/PIS/AIR-150/file/AIR-150_DS(032924)_Final20240403110932.pdf) that integrates a Hailo-8 M.2 AI module to provide up to 26Tops.

Fritsch said typical applications for edge AI included product inspection in manufacturing, face detection, people tracking and vehicle number-plate scanning.

“If somebody is in a building and shouldn’t be, they can be identified and tracked,” he said.

• Advantech has launched an IEC 62443 certification service to help its customers tackle IoT security problems more cheaply.

Advantech has joined forces with Bureau Veritas, a specialist in testing, inspection and certification, to help customers overcome security problems in AIoT and edge computing.

The IEC 62443 standards provide a security framework for IoT, widely adopted across industries such as energy, healthcare and transportation, to prevent losses from information security vulnerabilities. However, the framework can be difficult to navigate.

Miller Chang, president of Advantech’s embedded-IoT group, said securing edge computing devices was complex and required collaboration among customers, edge computing providers and certification organisations.

“By partnering with Bureau Veritas’ security team, we aim to empower customers across various industries to reduce certification costs and time, speed up the implementation of security measures, and achieve safe and smart IoT security,” said Chang.