03-06-2020 | Lattice Semiconductor Ltd | Design & Manufacture
Lattice Semiconductor and Etron has announced a memory controller reference design for Etron’s low pin-count RPC DRAM to facilitate low power Edge AI and video processing in applications needing a compact form factor, comprising industrial cameras, drones, AR/VR systems, and ADAS. A low power ECP5 FPGA from Lattice supplies processing for the AI or smart vision workload and works as the memory controller for Etron’s high-performance RPC DRAM. The reference design lessens power consumption, overall design size, and data latency by enabling developers to store data used in AI and smart vision applications locally instead of employing larger, external memory cards.
“This collaboration between our two companies - leaders in low power, small form factor FPGAs and DRAM memory technologies - has broad implications for the ongoing development of Edge AI devices,” said Kambiz Khalilian, director of Strategic Alliances, Lattice Semiconductor. “Not only does the reference design enable form factor and processing capabilities specifically tailored for implementation on Edge devices, it does so without requiring expertise in FPGA-based design thanks to our user-friendly design tools and our powerful sensAI software stack.”
“Our work with Lattice makes it possible for customers to develop devices with the low power computational resources needed to deliver ‘always-on’ intelligence at the Edge,” said Chung W. Lam, president of Etron Technology America. “Developers serving markets like industrial, automotive, and consumer are racing to differentiate their products by adding intelligence to them, so access to easy-to-use reference designs like this will be invaluable to their efforts.”
The reference design incorporates software development tools, featuring a GUI-based memory code generator tool and a Verilog simulation model.
