The acquisition will significantly enhance Renesas’ endpoint AI capabilities and provide more flexibility and efficiency for system developers to make their products AIoT (Artificial Intelligence of Things) ready, while speeding up time to market.
Embedding AI into products has becoming increasingly important in the connected world as workload requirements at the endpoint have evolved. For IIoT (Industrial IoT), consumer, automotive and other embedded applications that demand machine learning based intelligent decision-making physically closer to the source of the data, low latency and high security are key requirements.
In collaboration with its partners, Renesas has been offering development environments and software that allow AI to be embedded in its low-power, highly secure MCUs (microcontrollers) and MPUs (microprocessors). The Reality AI acquisition will allow Renesas to expand its in-house capability to provide comprehensive and highly optimised endpoint solutions both from the hardware as well as the software perspective. This will enable system developers to deliver endpoint intelligence across a wide range of IIoT, consumer and automotive applications.
Headquartered in the US, Reality AI offers a wide range of embedded AI and Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) solutions for advanced non-visual sensing in automotive, industrial and commercial products. The company provides machine learning with advanced signal processing math, delivering fast, efficient machine learning inference that can fit on the smallest MCUs.
Reality AI’s flagship Reality AI Tools, a software environment built to support the full product development lifecycle, provides analytics from non-visual sensor data. Their inference-based AI solutions can be implemented across various endpoint AI applications.
Combining these technologies with Renesas’ broad range of MCU and MPU portfolios will help developers apply advanced machine learning and signal processing to complex problems.
In addition to expanding embedded AI technologies, key IPs, software and tools, the acquisition will bring an AIoT centre-of-excellence in Maryland by acquiring Reality AI’s experts. This move will extend Renesas’ global software development talent base and spearhead its commitment to address the needs of customers eager to utilize AI.
“The importance and demand of data at the endpoint is increasing at an unprecedented scale. The acquisition of AI technology is an important milestone to address our customers’ emerging requirements for endpoint intelligence,” said Hidetoshi Shibata, President and CEO of Renesas. “The addition of Reality AI’s AI solutions to our existing embedded AI portfolios will further solidify our position as a leading AIoT solution provider.”
