2020 BRN Discussion, page-26740

An interesting article and discussion with the Renasas CEO - https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/semiconductors/our-insights/renesass-hidetoshi-shibata-on-leadership-through-difficult-times

McKinsey: Like 5G, Industry 4.0—the Fourth Industrial Revolution—is a big topic. How is Renesas planning to participate in this opportunity?

Hidetoshi Shibata: It is very similar to what we discussed regarding connectivity in 5G and beyond, with one key difference: a focus on AI [artificial intelligence], and what we call endpoint AI in particular. The endpoint represents the true point of action, as opposed to the edge of the cloud. Near-zero latency is critically important in those endpoints. So that is a key focus of our solutions. For example, we provide dynamically configurable hardware architectures that let customers enjoy the benefit of hardware-processing speeds while also providing more flexibility to change the functionality or algorithms.We are also enriching our translator capabilities to effectively port AI models trained on industry-standard networks to our hardware. Toward that end, we are working closely with advanced endpoint-compiler software partners to enable customers to test capabilities purely in the cloud before porting them over to our boards, and then, finally, to implement these seamlessly on our chips.