Tools

Calypto's Catapult 8 HLS: C-Based Hardware Design Matures

High-level synthesis (HLS) is a trend that BDTI has been following for quite some time, beginning with its several-decade-old academic foundations. Most commercial high-level synthesis efforts have focused on C-based design (whether ANSI C, C++ or SystemC), with toolsets that provided for translation of functionality defined at the behavioral level into logic at the register transfer level (RTL). In 2010, BDTI published certified HLS tool evaluation results for AutoESL's AutoPilot and Synopsys Read more...

SequenceL Programming Language, Toolset Strive to Leverage Multi-Core Processor Potential

For decades, multiprocessor systems were rare and most developers never had to think about how to program them. This began to change roughly a decade ago. In the spring of 2005, both AMD (Athlon 64 X2) and Intel ("Smithfield") unveiled x86 CPUs with dual processor cores on a single die. More recently, not only has the number of both physical and virtual on-chip cores steadily grown, the multi-core trend has also expanded into mobile and embedded applications. As multiprocessor chips become more Read more...

Case Study: BDTI's Expert, Independent Analysis Enables Optimum Vision Processor Selection

A growing number of products are incorporating computer vision capabilities. This, in turn, has led to rapid growth in the number of processors being offered for vision applications.  Selecting the best processor (whether a chip for use in a system design, or an IP core for use in an SoC) is challenging, for several reasons. First, these processors use very diverse architecture approaches, which makes it tough to compare them. Second, because vision applications and algorithms are also quite Read more...

Case Study: Independent Evaluation Enables a Development Kit to Hit a Home Run

BDTI is well known for its software-related capabilities: performance- and power consumption-related benchmarking, for example, along with algorithm evaluation and development and optimization work. In such projects, BDTI frequently employs semiconductor manufacturers' evaluation boards and associated software toolsets, which are often combined to create development kits. And as noted several months ago, BDTI is no stranger to hardware development, either, partnering with chip suppliers to co- Read more...

The Movidius Myriad 2: An Embedded Vision Processor Through and Through

Substantial industry investment in a particular application, both in terms of silicon devices and the software running on and interacting with them, is often a barometer of that application's transition toward mainstream adoption. This has definitely been the case recently for the practical implementation of computer vision technology, which for decades was limited to academic research and niche commercial uses. Now, however, the steadily improving performance, power consumption and cost- Read more...

Sensory: Voice and Face Recognition Blended Intelligently

Sensory has built its business and made its name over the past 20 years in voice detection and speech recognition, as InsideDSP's April 2013 coverage of the company's TrulyHandsFree always-on voice activation algorithm showcased. However, as Gordon Haupt, the company's director of vision technology, noted during a recent briefing, the name "Sensory" isn't speech-specific, indicative of the company’s long-term aspiration to expand beyond microphones into algorithms fed by other types of input Read more...

Synopsys' EM5D and EM7D Processor Cores: The ARC Architecture Gains DSP Capabilities

Although the ARC brand has kept a relatively low profile since being acquired by Synopsys in 2009, Synopsys reports that the ARC family of licensable cores are on track to ship more than 1.5 billion units this year. Until recently, ARC's offerings were "vanilla" Harvard architecture CPUs with no DSP-optimized features. That's all changed with the latest EM5D and EM7D (the "D" standing for "DSP"), the first two members of the EM DSP family, which were introduced in late May and are generally Read more...

Lithography, Architecture Evolutions Boost Analog Devices' Mid-Range Blackfin Devices

The April 2012 edition of InsideDSP covered Analog Devices' BF60x family, which as the then-published product roadmap indicated, was the successor to the high end of the BF5xx product range (Figure 1). Figure 1. Analog Devices' new BF70x products fill the "single core Blackfin" next-generation slot on the company's published roadmap two years ago. All four BF60x family members run at clock speeds of up to 500 MHz and integrate a dual Blackfin DSP cores; the BF608 and BF609 additionally embed a Read more...

Case Study: Diverse Assistance Leads To Vision Processing Optimization Success

As computer vision is deployed into a variety of new applications, driven by the emergence of powerful, low-cost, and energy-efficient processors, companies need to find ways to squeeze demanding vision processing algorithms into size-, weight-, power, and cost-constrained systems. Fortunately, BDTI's foundation as a benchmarking services company has, as has been mentioned before, provided its engineers with extensive skills in optimizing software to best exploit processor capabilities. And it' Read more...

NVIDIA's Jetson TK1 Evaluation Board Gets Embedded Vision

At NVIDIA's GTC (the yearly GPU Technology Conference) in March, the company trumpeted its intentions to broadly supply the embedded market with Tegra SoCs and associated hardware and software development tools. As a specific example of this overarching strategy, NVIDIA unveiled a small form factor development kit called "Jetson TKI" (Figure 1), based on the ARM Cortex-A15-based "Logan" Tegra K1 application processor introduced in January at the Consumer Electronics Show (see sidebar "A Series Read more...