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40 SMT007 MAGAZINE I MARCH 2021 Feature Interview by Nolan Johnson I-CONNECT007 Liran Bar, vice president of business devel- opment at Hailo, spoke with Nolan Johnson about how the Hailo-8 TM AI processor is help- ing drive factory automation forward and why companies like Foxconn and ABB are choos- ing it for their Industry 4.0 and smart factory applications. Nolan Johnson: Liran, I am interested in learn- ing about Hailo and what you're doing, espe- cially in the area of Industry 4.0 because that is a specific application you highlight for your products. Liran Bar: Hailo was founded in 2017 and is located in Tel Aviv. We have activities in many regions; in fact, during 2020 we opened offices in Japan and Taiwan, and we are in the process of opening branches in other countries. Right now, we have around 120 employees. It's a young company but we have a lot of engineers who came from large companies with exten- sive knowledge and experience in hardware and in soware. Beyond the hardware, so- ware is also a key component for our complete AI offering. Hailo has developed an AI inference proces- sor for edge devices. e chip itself (Figure 1), the Hailo-8, is designed to run AI tasks and it's designed for edge devices, not for devices relying fully on the cloud. It's not a general- purpose processor; it's dedicated to AI infer- ence. Training will continue to be done on GPUs, on the cloud, and so on. We've seen in the past few years a transi- tion from running computing in cloud to the edge. ere are many reasons for that, including latency, low power, low cost, pri- vacy, and reliability. Also, from a demo- graphic point of view, fewer and fewer young people want to work in occupations such as security or retail stores. erefore, devices need to be smarter to make up for a lack of human resources. Hailo-8 AI Processor Targets Smart Factory Applications Figure 1: The Hailo-8 TM AI processor.