AI MPU targets robotics

Renesas Electronics Corp. has expanded its RZ family of microprocessors (MPUs) with a new chip for robotics. The new RZ/V2H AI MPU features a new generation AI accelerator, offering significant improvements in power efficiency and inference performance.

Enabling both vision AI and real-time control capabilities, the RZ/V2H MPU incorporates a new generation of Renesas’ proprietary AI accelerator, the Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor (DRP)-AI3, delivering 10 TOPS/W power efficiency. The company said it is an “impressive 10-fold improvement over previous models.”

(Source: Renesas Electronics Corp.)

Also, the pruning technology used in the DRP-AI3 accelerator significantly improves AI computing efficiency, increasing AI inference performance up to 80 TOPS. This enables engineers to process vision AI applications directly at edge AI devices without relying on cloud computing platforms. Renesas released details of the  DRP-AI3 acceleration technology at the recent International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2024) in San Francisco.

The RZ/V2H is comprised of four Arm Cortex-A55 CPU cores with a maximum operating frequency of 1.8 GHz for Linux application processing, two Cortex-R8 cores running at 800 MHz for high-performance real-time processing and one Cortex-M33 as a sub core. These cores allow the device to manage both vision AI and real-time control tasks.

The MPU consumes less power, which eliminates the need for cooling fans and other components for heat dissipation, resulting in smaller, more reliable and less expensive system designs, the company said.

Renesas leveraged the DRP technology to develop the OpenCV Accelerator that speeds up the processing of OpenCV, an open-source computer vision library. The speed improvement is up to 16 times faster compared to CPU processing, according to Renesas.

To start your designs, Renesas also released AI Applications, a library of pre-trained models for a variety of use cases, and the AI software development kit (SDK). By running this software on the RZ/V2H’s evaluation board, engineers can evaluate AI applications even if they do not have extensive knowledge of AI.

Also offered is the Visual Detection Single Board Computer winning combination design that uses camera images to identify its surroundings, and to determine and control its movements in real-time. It incorporates the RZ/V2H MPU with power management ICs and VersaClock programmable clock generators.

The RZ/V2H MPU, evaluation board and the AI SDK are available now. Other members of the RZ/V family for AI include the RZ/V2MA, RZ/V2M and RZ/V2L.

RZ/V family for AI (Source: Renesas Electronics Corp.)