These new releases build upon Microchip’s smart embedded vision, industrial edge and intelligent edge communications stacks already available.
The announcement is a response to the rise of IoT, industrial automation and smart robotics, along with the proliferation of medical imaging solutions to the intelligent edge, which has made designing these types of power and thermally constrained applications more complex than ever before.
The solution stacks include firmware and IP cores for AI-assisted 4K60 computer vision, a diverse set of ready-to-use sensor and camera interfaces and integrated hardware for high-speed Ethernet protocols. Real-time ROS-2 compatible cores facilitate robotics tasks for perception and coordinate transformation.
The stacks offer time-sensitive industrial networking protocols for OPC/UA, rich operating systems support, and asymmetric processing commonly used in industrial automation.
Software design kits allow for a high-level of customisation and support diverse development environments centred around C/C++, RTL and popular machine learning frameworks, including the SmartHLS IDE, VectorBlox Accelerator SDK and the and Libero SoC Design Suite which has been certified for applications needing IEC61503 SIL 3 functional safety.
The solution stacks bring together PolarFire FPGAs and PolarFire SoC FPGAs, offering a rich mix of hardware and software solutions with cyber security protections that allow system designers to innovate in medical imaging and robotics applications.
“Our customers have an urgent requirement to drive significant innovation in secure, functionally safe, AI-assisted industrial automation and portable medical imaging that delivers unprecedented compute horsepower in the smallest of physical footprints which are thermally stressed, and that are very vulnerable to cyber-security threats,” said Shakeel Peera, vice president of marketing and strategy for Microchip’s FPGA business unit. “To that end, we are now providing developers in these segments the ability to utilise power-efficient hardware and customisable solution stacks with an end goal of rapidly deploying intelligent medical imaging and autonomous robots.”
