Embedded at the edge and in the fog

congatec is expanding its embedded and edge computing solution platform offering to include the new market of rugged fog computer technologies. Used in various industrial as well as critical network applications, rugged fog computers reside in the network computing and communication pyramid above the edge device layer. They serve the edge computing market with highly reliable real-time cloud server performance provided by on-premise as well as critical network infrastructure installations. Together, fog and edge devices build the real-time edge computing market that is rapidly gaining importance in embedded computing for harsh environments. The global edge computing market was valued at USD 3.5 billion in 2019, with a predicted CAGR exceeding 37% from 2020 to 2027^[1]. Typical applications range from Industry 4.0 and IIoT computing with predictive AI, to video analytics with a mesh of fog nodes to facilitate intelligent video processing by enabling anomaly detection, real-time tracking, and data insights. Industry verticals include energy and utilities; industrial manufacturing; robotics and controls; transportation and logistics; smart cities, homes and buildings; as well as healthcare, agriculture, retail, industrial wearables and datacenters.

Beside standard real-time computation, communication and control, fogs for edge devices and critical network applications often execute Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), and Augmented Reality (AR) solutions. They currently generate rapidly increasing demand from pharmaceutical vendors and healthcare establishments as these need to heighten and optimize their R&D efforts as quickly as possible to effectively counter the COVID-19 pandemic. VR/AR can also prove to be a valuable solution for remote assistance, helping to avoid unnecessary travel or facilitating e-learning, where demand will also surge as a result of school and university closures. congatec addresses these needs comprehensively with COM Express Type 7 based solutions and its brand new COM-HPC standard based platform offerings, which enable perfect performance balancing using real-time hypervisor technologies, and significantly reduce total cost of ownership by scaling the performance of the next fog generation with a simple change of the processor module.

“The challenge in real-time edge computing applications is to find the best setup for both, the fog services and the edge devices connected via time sensitive networking. As there are many tasks to be managed at the edges, OEM customers and professional end users need an individual mix of computation capabilities. We can fully address these needs by offering modularity on the hardware level as well as the software level, delivering perfectly tailored application ready platforms from a single source,” explains Jason Carlson, CEO of congatec AG.

World-leading in Computer-on-Modules, modularity on the hardware level has been congatec’s core competence for many years. The company’s own hypervisor software for real-time virtual machines rounds off the fog server platform offering on the software level and creates the foundation for OEMs’ further development steps to build perfectly tailored rugged fogs. congatec will expand its offerings in the future by including support from solution partners for vision, AI, VR, AR, big data analytics, and dedicated edge computing services that reside in the virtual machine configurations of the fog servers to offer IoT gateway and security functions for vulnerability, attack and anomaly detection, or cryptographic functions that are certified up to the FIPS 140-2 Level 3 or BSI Common Criteria EAL5 standards used in high-security applications.

[1] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/edge-computing-market