Check out the other 2023 IDEA Award Nominees. This article is also part of the TechXchange: AI on the Edge.
AI has evolved over the years and continues to be used in various applications meant to make our lives easier, such as cameras, security experiences, and autonomous vehicles. Typically, these systems rely on cloud-based resources to run, but at the risk of losing real-time responsiveness.
Texas Instruments aims to address this with its new family of six Arm Cortex-based vision processors. With these processors, you can add more vision and AI processing at a lower cost and with better energy efficiency in low-power applications, like video doorbells, machine vision, and autonomous mobile robots.
The family, which includes the AM62A, AM68A, and AM69A, is meant to help achieve real-time responsiveness “in the electronics that keep our world moving,” according to the company. The processors are supported by open-source elevation and model development tools, plus common software that’s programmable through industry-standard application programming interfaces (APIs), frameworks, and models.
By eliminating cost and design complexity roadblocks when implanting vision processing and deep-learning capabilities in low-power edge AI applications, the new vision processors can bring intelligence from the cloud to the real world to improve real-time responsiveness, said TI.
Up to 32 TOPS of AI Processing
The processors feature a system-on-chip (SoC) architecture that includes extensive integration. Among the integrated components are Arm Cortex-A53 or Cortex-A72 central processing units, a third-generation TI image signal processor, internal memory, interfaces, and hardware accelerators that deliver from 1 to 32 teraoperations per second (TOPS) of AI processing for deep-learning algorithms.
AM62A3, AM62A3-Q1, AM62A7 and AM62A7-Q1 processors can support one to two cameras at less than 2 W in applications such as video doorbells and smart retail systems. The AM62A3 is claimed as the industry's lowest-cost 1-TOPS vision processor (US$12 in 1,000-unit quantities). Meanwhile, the AM68A enables one to eight cameras in applications like machine vision. Finally, the AM69A achieves 32 TOPS of AI processing for one to 12 cameras in high-performance applications such as edge AI boxes, autonomous mobile robots, and traffic-monitoring systems.
In addition to the new processors, Texas Instruments also offers Edge AI Studio, a free open-source tool that helps improve time-to-market for edge AI applications. With the tool, designers are able to quickly develop and test AI models using user-created models and the company’s optimized models, which can also be retrained with custom data.