Renesas Electronics Company, a premier provider of superior semiconductor options, has expanded its fashionable RZ Household of microprocessors (MPUs) with a brand new machine concentrating on high-performance robotics functions. Providing the best ranges of efficiency inside the household, the RZ/V2H allows each imaginative and prescient AI and real-time management capabilities.

The machine comes with a brand new era of Renesas proprietary AI accelerator, DRP (Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor)-AI3, delivering 10 TOPS/W energy effectivity, a powerful 10-fold enchancment over earlier fashions. Moreover, pruning expertise employed within the DRP-AI3 accelerator considerably improves AI computing effectivity, boosting AI inference efficiency as much as 80 TOPS. This efficiency increase permits engineers to course of imaginative and prescient AI functions instantly at edge AI units with out counting on cloud computing platforms. The small print of the brand new DRP-AI3 acceleration expertise had been not too long ago offered on the Worldwide Strong-State Circuits Convention (ISSCC 2024) in San Francisco.

The RZ/V2H incorporates 4 Arm Cortex-A55 CPU cores with a most working frequency of 1.8 GHz for Linux utility processing, two Cortex-R8 cores operating at 800 MHz for high-performance real-time processing, and one Cortex-M33 as a sub-core. By integrating these cores right into a single chip, the machine can successfully handle each imaginative and prescient AI and real-time management duties, making it very best for demanding robotics functions of the longer term. Because the RZ/V2H consumes much less energy, it eliminates the necessity for cooling followers and different heat-dissipating elements. This implies engineers can design programs which can be smaller in measurement, cheaper, and extra dependable.

“As a market chief in motor management microprocessors, Renesas is able to tackle the subsequent problem to drive the development of the robotics market with AI expertise,” mentioned Daryl Khoo, Vice President of the Embedded Processing 1st Enterprise Division at Renesas. “The RZ/V2H will facilitate the event of next-generation autonomous robots with imaginative and prescient AI capabilities, which have the flexibility to suppose independently and management actions in actual time.”

Renesas has utilized its proprietary DRP expertise to develop the OpenCV Accelerator that hastens the processing of OpenCV, an open-source trade normal library for pc imaginative and prescient processing. The ensuing velocity enchancment is as much as 16 occasions sooner in comparison with CPU processing. The mixture of the DRP-AI3 and the OpenCV Accelerator enhances each AI computing and picture processing algorithms, enabling the power-efficient, real-time execution of Visible SLAM(Observe 1) utilized in functions resembling robotic vacuum cleaners.

To speed up growth, Renesas additionally launched AI Purposes, a library of pre-trained fashions for numerous use circumstances, and the AI SDK (Software program Growth Package) for fast growth of AI functions. By operating these software program on the RZ/V2H’s analysis board, engineers can consider AI functions simply and earlier within the design course of, even when they don’t have in depth data of AI.

“We’re thrilled to be a part of the launch of the RZ/V2H, which mixes AI expertise with real-time management,” says Rolf Segger, founding father of SEGGER Microcontroller GmbH. “SEGGER’s J-Hyperlink debug probe, extensively adopted by quite a few embedded growth initiatives globally, will present the assist wanted for the RZ/V2H, serving to speed up the event of next-generation robotic improvements. We stay up for this subsequent section in our multi-decade-long partnership with Renesas.”