Want to differentiate your industrial equipment? AI in manufacturing serves as a primary source of competitive advantage, enhancing productivity in production lines and warehouses. Metis – Axelera AI’s AI acceleration platform – helps you adopt and accelerate edge AI in manufacturing. With Metis, your machine vision and Industry 4.0 equipment can deliver unmatched AI performance.
“Our partnership with Axelera AI ensures that we not only meet customers’ current needs but also help future-proof their deployments by providing a best-in-class solution”
~Andrea Gozzi, General Manager of System Electronics
The Metis AIPU advantage
For all industrial edge applications, industrial-grade reliability, low power consumption for extended temperature range and fanless design, as well as low latency and high throughput are the common challenges in AI hardware. Axelera AI’s Metis platform answers these challenges. Metis offers industrial equipment manufacturers vision AI performance that other accelerators cannot achieve. Metis even enables industrial AI acceleration at a GPU level where power-hungry GPUs are not a viable option.
With its unbeatable combination of high performance with low power consumption, the Metis Al platform is the best choice for AI at the edge. The Metis AIPU is a game-changer, as it can perform up to 214 trillion operations per second at ultra-low latency without sacrificing accuracy. It enables manufacturers and machine builders to enhance productivity and customer satisfaction developing energy-efficient and cost-effective applications at the edge.
Boost efficiency with AI-driven applications in manufacturing
AI-based visual inspection systems utilize machine learning algorithms to analyze and evaluate product images in real time. The applications are endless, including use cases which were simply not possible before, like real-time sorting of garbage or vegetables with a level of granularity previously unattainable without neural networks. Furthermore, these systems enable faster and more flexible Optical Character Recognition (OCR), advanced defect analysis, precise pick-and-place operations, and sophisticated 3D vision in robotic applications. Innovation on the production line is all about AI.
Smart Warehouses powered by AI
Time-motion study has been a business efficiency technique since the early 20th century. Hundred years later, video systems can provide extremely accurate insights for boosting workers productivity while protecting their privacy. The same systems can also monitor occupancy storage and traffic areas to optimize picking and packing. Autonomous Mobile Robots are redefining the way goods are moving inside a warehouse, requiring a navigation system based on 6 or more cameras to ensure reliable and safe operation. Similarly, in vertical automated warehouses, computer vision AI can help operators reduce error rates by alerting employees handpicking wrong products from the drawer, thereby improving accuracy and reducing wastage.
Next-gen AI-enabled products for machine builders
Machine builders are leveraging AI to create value for their customers and get insights on the way the machine is operating. Integrated video analytics can detect defects in real-time, improving customer satisfaction through better quality and increased productivity. Simultaneously, these systems can identify patterns in machine outputs that signal the need for maintenance before a failure occurs. Another critical area is worker safety. In 2021, the manufacturing industry had one of the highest rates of nonfatal work injuries and illnesses, surpassed only by healthcare and retail. Video analytics can enhance safety by slowing down machine speed when an operator approaches and stopping the machine if biometric data indicate that the worker is unauthorized.
Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO & Co-founder explains how Axelera AI addresses market gaps with innovative computer vision AI and AI accelerator hardware, delivering high performance and efficiency for the embedded and Edge spaces at lower power consumption.
Freedom to innovate
The highly energy-efficient, easy-to-integrate and future-proof Axelera AI Metis Platform accelerates equipment and software deployment by providing a comprehensive hardware and software solution for accelerating Vision AI in Industrial Manufacturing. While the hardware design enhances performance or reduces cost and power consumption, the usability of Metis makes vision AI technology accessible to a broader range of developers and enterprises worldwide, so they have the freedom to innovate.
Outstanding power efficiency
Our cutting-edge chip features a power envelope of less than 15W, ensuring efficient energy usage while delivering exceptional performance. With the capability to downclock, you can fine-tune the power consumption to meet your specific needs, all while maintaining an outstanding frames-per-second per watt (fps/W) ratio. This balance of power efficiency and performance makes our chip the ideal choice for high-demand applications.
High accuracy
Our networks are automatically quantized during compilation to run efficiently and accurately on Metis. The accuracy after quantization remains comparable to the original floating-point networks. For example, two popular networks, Resnet-50 and Yolov7, each achieve quantized accuracy within 0.17% of the original 32-bit floating point models.
Cost-Effective
The Metis AIPU offers a unique blend of cost-effective and energy-efficient AI inference capabilities. Moreover, a single chip can deliver up to 214 trillion operations per second. Our PCIe card powered by 4 Metis AIPU achieves record-breaking performance and efficiency.
3 reasons why Metis accelerates AI in Industrial Manufacturing
The Metis AIPU stands out by offering this transformative capability with industry leading power and cost efficiency. Voyager SDK (link), our easy-to-use and flexible toolchain built upon open-source components, supports object detection networks like YoloV7 and YoloV8, segmentation networks like UNet, different OCR networks, and many more. It also provides full flexibility to optimize performance and customize the computer vision pipeline for the specific application.
The Metis AI platform ensures that AI in manufacturing meets the rigorous demands of industrial applications, and does so with unparalleled cost efficiency and operational reliability, all while keeping data secure onsite.
Accelerate your route to market for machine vision equipment
Getting started with the Metis AI Platform is easy thanks to our end-to-end evaluation systems, based on both x86 and ARM platforms. Experience the inference and accuracy capabilities of our Metis AIPU, and work on integrating your application for some real-world benchmark. Integrating the Metis AIPU into your products will then be simplicity itself, thanks to our acceleration cards based on M.2 and PCIe standard form factors .
What’s more, our low-code Voyager SDK speeds up software development and system integration, helping you bring your industrial equipment to market fast.
Tweak one of our pre-trained AI models or develop your own – with our unique quantization method you may only need a short calibration based on a small subset of your existing dataset. Either way, our integrated systen ensures optimized end-to-end performance and the highest accuracy possible. Supporting open standards including OpenCL and SYCL, the Voyager SDK integrates seamlessly into your existing development flow for maximum ease of use.
“The exceptional performance and accuracy of the Axelera AI Acceleration platform have significantly fueled our collaborative efforts. Its unmatched performance-to-price ratio, surpassing traditional GPUs and dedicated AI processing units, has been critical in our selection process. We are confident that leveraging their state-of-the-art performances will empower us to tackle new challenges in our current and future applications.”
~Alexandre Perez, R&D Director at XXII
Flexible AI hardware to support all industrial customers
Industrial Manufacturing applications come in all shapes and sizes. However, the Metis AIPU, the most scalable AI accelerator technology on the market is available, so you can easily support all your projects with a single platform. We offer single-AIPU M.2 acceleration cards and a PCIe acceleration card, letting you balance cost and performance. Need more AI power for larger optical inspection lines or high efficiency for your embedded system? Axelera AI’s portfolio can cover all your different needs with a scalable range of products and a strong ecosystem of partner solutions.
