Complete standalone DSP for automotive, surveillance, drone and mobile markets

Cadence Design Systems has unveiled the Cadence Tensilica Vision C5 DSP, claimed to be the industry’s first standalone, self-contained neural network DSP IP core optimized for vision, radar/lidar and fused-sensor applications with high-availability neural network computational needs. Targeted for the automotive, surveillance, drone and mobile/wearable markets, the DSP offers 1TMAC/sec computational capacity to run all neural network computational tasks. “Many of our customers are in the difficult position of selecting a neural network inference platform today for a product that may not ship for a couple of years or longer,” said Steve Roddy, senior group director, Tensilica marketing at Cadence. “Not only must neural network processors for always-on embedded systems consume low power and be fast on every image, but they should also be flexible and future proof. All of the current alternatives require undesirable tradeoffs, and it was clear a new solution is needed. We architected the Vision C5 DSP as a general-purpose neural network DSP that is easy to integrate and very flexible, while offering better power efficiency than CNN accelerators, GPUs and CPUs.” “The applications for deep learning in real-world devices are tremendous and diverse, and the computational requirements are challenging,” said Jeff Bier, founder of the Embedded Vision Alliance. “Specialized programmable processors like the Vision C5 DSP enable deployment of deep learning in cost- and power-sensitive devices.”