Predictive Maintenance with NPU Supported MCUs: Predicting the Future

Amazeng Technical Team
6 min read
NPUMCUPredictive MaintenanceEdge AIIndustry 4.0

Introduction

In the industrial world, an unplanned downtime of a machine sometimes means a loss of millions of dollars. "Predictive Maintenance," developed to prevent this loss, used to be done by sending the data to the cloud and analyzing it there. However, NPU (Neural Processing Unit) units found in next-generation microcontrollers (MCU) allow us to perform this analysis directly at the transmitter layer on the machine.

What is NPU and Why is it a Revolution?

NPU is a hardware unit that performs mathematical operations of neural networks (matrix multiplications, activation functions, etc.) 100 times faster and with 10 times less energy than the CPU.

  • Big Difference: A standard MCU struggles and slows down while running a complex artificial intelligence model. An NPU-supported MCU, on the other hand, can analyze thousands of vibration data per second in real time and say instantly "this bearing will fail within 2 weeks."

A New Era in Predictive Maintenance

NPU-supported smart transmitters and data acquisition devices provide:

  1. Continuous Monitoring: Not just at certain intervals, but 7/24 uninterrupted "deep analysis."
  2. Dynamic Threshold Values: While classic systems work with fixed limits, NPU-supported systems learn the normal behavior of the machine at every stage (operating load, temperature, etc.) and detect anomalies accordingly.
  3. Energy Efficiency: Thanks to the NPU, much smarter operations can be done without increasing the battery life or energy consumption of the device.

Amazeng and NPU Technology

As the Amazeng engineering team, we closely follow and integrate processor architectures with NPU accelerators (such as STM32-N6) in our next-generation hardware designs.

  • The high-resolution reading capability of our ZMA Data Acquisition platform provides the purest raw data for NPU-based algorithms.
  • In our future projects, we aim to place these hardware artificial intelligence units directly into our noise filtering and calibration processes.

Conclusion

Maintenance teams in future factories will not wait for machines to break down. With notifications from NPU-supported smart sensors, they will be able to intervene in malfunctions when there is no sign yet. This is not just an efficiency, but a radical change of mindset in the industrial world.

Contact our technical experts for your NPU-supported predictive maintenance projects and special design needs.

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