Second development tool released for embedded vision applications at the edge

Microchip Technology has released its second development tool providing its Smart Embedded Vision initiative for designers using its PolarFire RISC-V SoC FPGA. The industry’s lowest-power SoC FPGA in its class, the PolarFire device, is claimed to be the only mid-range device of its type that simultaneously supports dual 4K video processing and quad-core RISC-V application-class processors running the RTOS and rich operating systems such as Linux.

Its Smart Embedded Vision development platform adds to the company’s previously announced VectorBlox SDK and IP for using the PolarFire devices to program a trained neural network with no prior FPGA expertise. The latest release simplifies edge-compute solution development in the thermally challenging environments of the IIoT and factory automation applications.

The platform incorporates support for its Mi-V RISC-V ecosystem comprising development tools from AdaCore, Green Hills Software, Mentor Graphics and Wind River. Commercial RTOS solutions are offered, including VxWorks and Nucleus, and free ones incorporating Zephyr and FreeRTOS. Middleware solutions are provided from DornerWorks, Hex Five and Veridify Security.

These SoC FPGAs combine thermal efficiency and defence-grade security for smart, connected systems with half the power consumption of other options. The SoC and the Smart Embedded Vision Platform provide designers with the choice of rich operating system-based edge compute, hard real-time, with large 2MB memory and mixed real-time plus rich OS support. Users may learn one platform and serve three applications.