Microprocessors

Nature provides the model for integrating sensors for a distributed edge AI system, say Bartosz Boryna and Zuzana Jirankova. The horseshoe crab (limulus polyphemus) is recognised by scientists as an interesting model for vision research because the animal’s body is large enough to study and its retina neurons are quite easily accessible. The crab has several compound eyes distributed over ...

The third generation of general-purpose neural processing units (GPNPUs) by Quadric introduces pre-integrated clusters of two, four or eight cores to deliver up to 108 TOPS. This latest iteration has increased performance and optimisations for generative AI. the company has also introduced a safety enhanced version for automotive applications. The company described the Chimera QC series as NPUs with a ...

Rohm has released a line of 16bit microcontrollers for power supplies with hybrid analogue-digital control loops, plus an evaluation board with software as a design stepping stone. “In recent years medium power power supplies are required to provide a level of reliability and precise control that is difficult to meet with analogue-only configurations,” said Rohm. “On the other hand, while ...

Microchip has announced its first 64bit processors, picking the RISC-V instruction set for the initial parts: an octa-core for space and a industrial quad-core. Although, “future PIC64 families will include devices based on RISC-V or Arm architectures”, said the company. PIC64-HPSC is the family name of the space processors, which have come out of a 2022 deal with NASA to ...

At DAC 2024, Efabless celebrated a milestone of 40 commercial companies designed chips using its chipIgnite and Google-sponsored OpenMPW programme. Of these, some are ready for production volumes, the majority are at the prototype/proof of concept stage, said CEO, Michael Wishart. The platform allows start-ups and smaller companies to prototype designs and innovate without having to buy a license, he ...

SiFive announced the 4th generation of RISC-V CPU cores for embedded applications at RISC-V Summit Europe 2024 today. There are eight cores, three of which are 32bit while the other five are 64bit. To trade performance against power and area, their pipelines will span two-stage single-issue, to eight-stage dual-issue – see the table below. They are all covered by the ...

Alif Semiconductor has removed the Bluetooth transceiver from its Balletto B1 microcontroller to create an MCU with (or without) 46Gop/s of neural network processing that will be available in packages as small as a 3.9 x 3.9mm 90bump WLCSP. Dubbed E1C, the family all get a single 160MHz Arm Cortex-M55 CPU with Helium vector processing extensions, then some will also ...

The growing interest in exploring modular hardware instead of a traditional chip-down approach requires an understanding of the pros and cons of each approach, say James Jaksich and Camron Chilton. There are five key benefits of a system-on-module (som) approach, which will help engineers through the make vs buy decision process. Flexibility Standards defining size, connectors and interfaces play a ...

At Computex 2024, Intel has revealed details of its Lunar Lake architecture for AI PC processors. It has been designed for power efficiency compute performance in ‘thin and light’ PC models. The processors include Performance-cores (P-cores) and Efficient-cores (E-cores) for energy efficiency and AI compute performance. They also have a fourth generation neural processing unit with up to 48TOPs of ...

Ambarella has announced a pair of 5nm AI camera processors for  in-vehicle fleet telematics. “CV75AX provides up to 2x the AI performance over Ambarella’s prior-generation SoC, enabling the latest transformer neural networks for improved accuracy and reduced false positives without having to train for every object. [It] also provides the AI horsepower for more complex driver-scoring models,” according to the ...