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Winners of the embedded award 2025
A top-class jury has evaluated around 130 submissions – a new record – for the 21st embedded award. "It was not only the large number of submissions, with which the exhibitors once again set a record, but also the high quality that made our jury's heads spin," says jury chairman Prof. Dr.-Ing. Axel Sikora. We present the winners in the nine categories …
Outstanding innovations in the field of embedded system technologies
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a category of the embedded award since 2023 to follow the exciting trend of more and more intelligent systems in the embedded edge. Interestingly, it is not the old paradigm any more to learn in the cloud and to infer in the edge, but the topic is increasingly about learning in the edge, thus reducing the amount of network traffic, increasing privacy, and enabling real-time characteristics.
The company Ambiq is rewarded the first prize in this vibrant field for its product heartKIT™ AI Development Kit, an AI-powered heart-monitoring solution.
Vital sign monitoring applications are essential in many digital health devices due to their ability to track and diagnose various health conditions. However, these systems often face challenges such as inaccuracies, latency issues, and power limitations.
To address these challenges, Ambiq offers heartKIT, an open-source AI development kit (ADK) designed to help developers easily create personalized, real-time, and energyefficient heart-monitoring applications for battery-powered devices. The kit includes a comprehensive set of datasets, optimized model architectures, and heart-related tasks.
More information on all nominees in the category Artificial intelligence (AI)
Electronic Displays
Electronic Displays is the new category of the embedded award – and was already well received by the exhibitors, who send in many applications for this price category. From these, the jury nominated three products and chose the winner in the Electronic Displays category.
The first price goes to Tianma for its product 8" Micro LED IRIS PHUD, a tool for immersive visualization of information.
The IRIS HUD addresses key challenges in traditional driving systems, such as visual distractions and limited interaction. By solving these issues, it enhances safety, improves the driving experience, and drives the innovation of automotive technology.
In the current display technology market, Micro-LED technology is gaining attention for its excellent performance and broad application prospects. Tianma’s 8" Micro-LED IRIS HUD stands out as a notable competitor, offering several unique advantages.
First, it boasts a pixel density of 167 PPI, delivering sharper, more detailed visuals for enhanced visual performace. Second, its fully transparent windshield design integrates seamlessly with vehicle interiors, enhancing both functionality and aesthetics.
More information on all nominees in the category Electronic Displays
Embedded Vision
Embedded vision systems are posing highest demands to many of the system elements. As a matter of fact, data volumes and data rates are significantly higher than for many other embedded systems. Consequently, demands not only on hardware elements like interfaces or memory, but also on software and AI algorithms are driving the entire industry.
The first price in this category goes to Team Group Inc. for its product D500R WORM SD / D500R WORM microSD, a memory card with exceptional data protection capabilities.
The D500R tamper-proof memory card is specifically designed to address the challenges of critical data storage and security, making it an ideal solution for scenarios requiring high tamper resistance and long-term preservation.
Its signature "Write Once, Read Many" (WORM) technology ensures that data, once written, is permanently immutable and cannot be deleted, effectively safeguarding data integrity and immutability.
More information on all nominees in the category Embedded Vision
Hardware
Increasing softwareisation does not change the fact that hardware platforms are the basis for every embedded system. This category having once more the most submissions for the embedded award this year underlines the importance of embedded hardware products. Especially three nominees convinced our jury. And it will be obvious that hardware is far from being “just commodity”.
The company Cadence Design Systems is awarded the first prize in the hardware category for its Cadence Base System Chiplet.
The industry is shifting from monolithic heterogeneous SoCs to chiplet-based products for several compelling reasons. Chiplet-based products enhance design and product factors, such as design/die reuse, contributing to engineering efficiency, faster platform refresh cadence, and the ability to optimize power, performance, and area (PPA) per chiplet.
In a significant leap forward, Cadence has successfully prototyped, designed, and taped out the industry's first base system chiplet. This chiplet integrates processors, system IP, and memory IP within a single package, interconnected through the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express™(UCIe™) standard interface.
More information on all nominees in the category Hardware
Safety&Security
Intensive networking, increasing autonomy of devices, higher demands with regards to reliable functions lead to growing demands on the functional safety of embedded systems in hardware and software and on protection against external attacks, on the security.
The first price in this category goes to Tropic Square for its product TROPIC01, a truly open secure element chip.
Secure elements are traditionally designed with closed architectures. The lack of visibility of implementation details prevents developers from fully understanding how the chip works to best integrate the hardware into their own secure system design.
Even for secure elements that have been certified as compliant with certain security standards, it is unclear if all functionality of the chip was tested.
TROPIC01 addresses the concern of secure hardware having backdoors or hidden flaws by providing access to the design, documentation, and tools to conduct independent security reviews, audits, and testing.
More information on all nominees in the category Safety&Security
SoC/IC/IP design
The design of integrated circuits (ICs), System-on-chip (SoC) and of circuits that are then integrated into ICs, the so-called intellectual property (IP), is a core discipline of embedded system development. This core discipline has now finally found its way into the embedded award as a category – in order to strengthen the visibility of this very advanced design discipline.
The first price goes to NXP Semiconductors for its product Trimension NCJ29D6: Ultra-Wideband IC, a monolithic UWB chipset.
The growing number of applications and technologies in modern cars leads to an increase in cost, weight and complexity. Due to the combined Ultra-wideband (UWB) ranging and radar capabilities of Trimension NCJ29D6 and its multi-application support it has the potential to save up to 100$ BoM per car to reduce cost and weight which is critical to increase energy efficiency of vehicles.
Among others, the NCJ29D6 targets applications such as smart car access, kicksensing and child presence detection. In the latter, NCJ29D6 is used to ensure that vulnerable passengers, especially children, aren’t left behind in a car, where temperatures can quickly rise to dangerous levels, even on mild or cloudy days by detecting signs of life such as breathing patterns. Thus, NCJ29D6 is used in safetyrelated use cases to avoid heat strokes and hence to saves lives.
More information on all nominees in the category SoC/IC/IP design
Software
Of course, the softwareization is driving the embedded world. And more and more software-defined architectures and devices are entering the market. Thus, we received a large number of submissions for the embedded award this year in the software category.
The first price goes to Driver for its product of the same name, a software that specializes in technical documentation.
Software engineers spend countless hours struggling to understand undocumented systems and writing technical documentation when they should be building extraordinary products. Driver solves this problem by automating technical documentation that stays synchronized with code changes, allowing engineers to focus on building what matters and saving the business significant time and resources.
The Driver solution can process codebases of any size or language, breaking them down into manageable components before reconstructing them into comprehensive technical documentation.
Start-up
Young companies are driving technological development. The startup scene in the embedded industry is correspondingly lively and since several years, the embedded world runs a dedicated startup zone. In addition, it is extremely impressive to observe the intense collaboration between multi-billion corporations and small and young enterprises. All this is reason enough to dedicate a separate category to start-ups at the embedded award.
The first price in the startup category goes to Accelerat for its product AI Bunker, a secure storage for AI models.
Embedded devices increasingly rely on AI models to perform disparate tasks. Companies need to spend a lot of effort, time, and money to build AI models, such as deep neural networks, due to a long process that includes onerous design and development phases.
AI models are however susceptible to theft, tampering, and unauthorized access due to the vulnerabilities of hardware and software environments. AI Bunker addresses this by enabling secure storage of AI models within a dedicated, strongly-isolated software partition on the embedded device, ensuring high levels of protection. At the same time, it transparently allows invoking the model’s inference using a standard workflow, making it appear as if the model resides in a regular environment.
Tools
Automated tools increase efficiency and reliability at all levels of the embedded value chain. There are tried and tested tools that have been used for years. However, in order to further optimize development processes, the need for new tools is always there.
The first price in the category tools goes to the company Siemens EDA for its product Catapult AI NN, a customized AI accelerator.
AI is going to make our embedded devices more functional, easier to use, safer, and more secure. But deploying AI on embedded systems can be challenging due to the constraints on power and compute capability, real time performance requirements, cost, size, weight, and so much more.
As AI algorithms become increasingly complex, running them on an embedded processor or even an embedded GPU is becoming untenable. A bespoke accelerator, that is, an accelerator designed specifically for your inferencing needs, will deliver the highest performance and efficiency.
Catapult AI NN from Siemens EDA automates the custom accelerator hardware design process. It enables developers to go from an AI framework to completed hardware RTL in a single automated step.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a category of the embedded award since 2023 to follow the exciting trend of more and more intelligent systems in the embedded edge. Interestingly, it is not the old paradigm any more to learn in the cloud and to infer in the edge, but the topic is increasingly about learning in the edge, thus reducing the amount of network traffic, increasing privacy, and enabling real-time characteristics.
The company Ambiq is rewarded the first prize in this vibrant field for its product heartKIT™ AI Development Kit, an AI-powered heart-monitoring solution.
Vital sign monitoring applications are essential in many digital health devices due to their ability to track and diagnose various health conditions. However, these systems often face challenges such as inaccuracies, latency issues, and power limitations.
To address these challenges, Ambiq offers heartKIT, an open-source AI development kit (ADK) designed to help developers easily create personalized, real-time, and energyefficient heart-monitoring applications for battery-powered devices. The kit includes a comprehensive set of datasets, optimized model architectures, and heart-related tasks.
More information on all nominees in the category Artificial intelligence (AI)
