Mark Thompson, senior product marketing manager with Synopsys’ DesignWare ARC processor group, said: “When we started working on vision processors in 2012, we weren’t clear where the market was heading. But demand has now taken off and the future is looking bright; for example, one automotive customer is looking to put 15 cameras into a car.”
The EV6 range will feature three devices which differ in the number of cores. “This gives scalability and the ability to design higher performance products in the future, ” Thompson contended. “While most companies are planning systems handling 720p or 1080p images, we are beginning to see the emergence of apps requiring 4K video. That contrasts with when we started design of the EV5 range, when everyone was talking about VGA graphics, not even 720p.”
According to Thompson, applications requiring 4K video include high end security, such as stadium surveillance, but he noted that demand from industrial users was not strong.
The EV61, 62 and 64 vision processors offer one, two or four vision CPU cores respectively, as well as a programmable Convolution Neural Network (CNN) engine. The CNN engine operates in parallel with the vision CPUs for accurate object detection, image classification and semantic segmentation. The EV6x processor family is supported by a programming environment based on common embedded vision standards, including OpenVX and OpenCL C, as well as Synopsys’ MetaWare Development Toolkit.
Each vision CPU includes a 32bit scalar unit and a 512bit wide vector DSP and can be configured for 8, 16 or 32bit operations. The four CPU variant delivers up to 620GOPS/s, while the optional CNN engine delivers up to 800MACs/cycle and supports image resolutions up to 4K.
“The CNN engine is close to hardware in terms of power efficiency,” Thompson pointed out, “but is fully programmable.”
Synopsys expects the cores to be used mainly for offline processing, for example in SoCs, but it notes some customers are planning to use EV6 cores in standalone processors.
The EV6 vision processors will be generally available in October 2016, with products featuring the cores expected to start appearing on the market early in 2018.