Renesas Redefines AI Solutions Portfolio One Year After Acquiring Reality AI Software. Just over a year has passed since Renesas announced its intent to acquire reality AI. This month, we celebrated this milestone at the SensorsConverge Conference in Santa Clara. We showcased Reality AI’s AI and TinyML solutions integrated across multiple applications. Renesas’s AI strategy is centered around Reality AI. Over the next few months, you will hear from us as we host a SEMICON West/DAC panel in San Francisco. We will be joining industry colleagues to examine the impact of AI on semiconductor design and manufacture. This will be supplemented by a series of AI-themed webinars and podcasts, culminating in Renesas AI Live during the fourth quarter.

Mohammed Umar Dogar is vice president for global business development at Renesas. Mohammed Umar Dogar shared his thoughts about how the Reality AI purchase has enabled our company to integrate AI into new tools and systems-level solutions in order to improve our development journey and to make the lives of our customers easier.

What was it that Renesas liked about Reality AI? What was the value they brought to Renesas that wasn’t there before?

Mohammed : Our relationship with Reality AI began in 2021, when we ramped up the technology ecosystem for RA Microcontrollers. We sought system-level enabling technologies to help our customers create helpful something using highly efficient edge and Endpoint Computing.

Reality AI was a standout because they combined proprietary signal processing technologies and ML to create machine learning models, which were extremely effective and small.

Vision and voice applications get a lot of press, but there is potential with a great many non-visual/non-verbal ML applications in the industrial and automotive sectors. TinyML models that can perform anomaly detection, classification, and regression using real-time high-frequency sensors are a great benefit to our customers.

What sets Reality AI apart from other ecosystem partners that you have vetted

Mohammed Out of the seven to eight companies that we examined, Reality AI was the one with the best combination of skills, team capabilities, and core AI technology. They also had successful engagements around the globe with major industrial and automotive clients, which validated their technology. This was also a sign that they were implementing the quality control industry demands of their vendors. We saw that they had a lot of experience in a variety of vertical markets, which is something new companies usually struggle to achieve.

What is the state of things a year following the acquisition? What lessons have you learned since the purchase?

Mohammed: The integration has been going very well. Reality AI is exclusively available on Renesas MCUs, MPUs, and all our MPUs. It supports our 16-bit RL78 Microcontrollers to our 64-bit RZ Microprocessors.

When we announced the acquisition, we also said we would create an AI center in Columbia, Md., at Reality AI’s former headquarters. One year later, this team developed vertically-layered tools and ecosystems for customers to create AI and machine learning across our hardware portfolio. They have focused quickly on improving the customer experience with AI and machine learning.

What is the significance of this?

Mohammed Traditionally, AI tools and embedded tools are not connected. We worked hard on understanding how to integrate these two domains so that Renesas E2 Studio and RealityAI Tools could work seamlessly together.

We were able, very early on, to create an API-based exchange of context between these two tools. Now we have a road map. There’s still a lot to do before we can provide a seamless experience. However, the tools are now linked from the perspective of contextual exchange, so customers can easily move projects between them. This is a great example of how we have made the journey easier for developers.

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What other achievements of Reality AI can you mention over the last year?

Mohammed : We have a portfolio that includes solutions on different levels. For example, we can show how an AI/ML solution could be applied to a specific use case, such as detecting unbalanced loads in motors that share electrical data with motor controllers. This application illustrates what customers can achieve with a new add-on toolbox to Reality AI that integrates with Renesas Motor Control Kits. It allows Reality AI models (RealityCheck(TM), MOTOR) to be integrated into the motor control process. It allows a sensorless ML model to detect conditions without adding any additional materials to the bill of materials. Customers can add condition monitoring or predictive maintenance functionality by simply updating their firmware.

We have also created the Holy Grail for vertical integration with RealityCheck (TM) HVAC. This AI-enabled endpoint solution allows us to develop intelligent, self-diagnosing air conditioning, heat pumps, and refrigeration systems. This is an integrated solution that includes hardware, software, and reference design. It also includes a selection of sensors, production-grade data, and many sensors. In a professional laboratory, we instrument the HVAC systems of customers and collect high-quality data to build and calibrate models.

As a recap, Reality AI includes application examples that are primarily for demonstration purposes. There are also toolboxes for customers who work in specific domains to help them with data collection and pipelining. Then there are fully integrated solutions suites.

What was the biggest surprise to Renesas in its integration of Reality AI across your business lines?

Mohammed: Our customers’ reaction has been the biggest surprise. After the acquisition, we expected interest in Reality AI but were blown away by the scale of it. Now, we have customers using Reality AI solutions and software in the U.S.A., Europe, Japan, China, Taiwan, and even Africa. We have added resources to their team around the globe to meet this demand and provide the necessary support. We are winning sockets by combining Reality AI with Renesas best-in-class MCUs and MPUS. The first products featuring Reality AI software running on Renesas processors should be available soon. We’re just getting started!