Synopsys has launched the first products in its DesignWare EV vision processor range. The EV52 and EV54 processors are programmable and configurable IP cores said to combine the flexibility of software solutions with the low cost and low power consumption of dedicated hardware.
EV processors implement a convolutional neural network (CNN) that can operate at more than 1000GOPS/W, enabling fast and accurate detection of a wide range of objects such as faces, pedestrians and hand gestures at a fraction of the power consumption of competing vision solutions, according to the company.
"Embedded vision is driving innovation in a broad spectrum of applications, from surveillance to consumer and gaming devices," said John Koeter, pictured, vice president of marketing for IP and prototyping. "Synopsys' DesignWare EV Processor family delivers state-of-the-art object detection accuracy with 5X better power efficiency, along with comprehensive vision libraries and a robust software programming environment. This combination enables design teams to integrate embedded vision functionality into more systems faster with much lower power consumption than existing solutions."
The EV Processors include multiple cores that can run at up to 1GHz in a typical 28nm process. The processors also implement a feed forward CNN structure that supports a programmable point-to-point streaming interconnect for fast and accurate object detection.
The EV processor cores, designed for integration into an SoC, can be used with any host processor and operate in parallel with the host. In addition, the EV processor memory map is accessible to the host, allowing all vision processing to be offloaded. EV processors can also access image data stored in a memory mapped area of the SoC or from off chip sources
The DesignWare EV52 and EV54 Processors are scheduled to be available in May 2015.
