New-Tech Europe Magazine | Q3 2021 | Digital Edition

lower latency and power compared to GPU-based SOMs, critical for smart vision applications like security, traffic and city cameras, retail analytics, machine vision, and vision guided robotics. By standardizing the core parts of the system, developers have more time to focus on building in features that differentiate their technology from the competition. Unlike other edge AI products that allow software updates but are limited by fixed accelerators, Kria SOMs offer two degrees of flexibility - software and hardware over time. Users can adapt the I/O interfaces, vision processing, and AI accelerators to support some or all of the following: MIPI, LVDS, and SLVS-EC interfaces; higher quality, specialised high-dynamic range imaging algorithms for day or night; 8-bit deep learning processing units, or in the future, 4-bit or even binary neural network approaches. The intersection of multi-modal sensor fusion with real-time AI processing is now extremely accessible, starting with the Xilinx KV260 Vision AI Starter Kit and deploying into production with the Kria K26 SOM. Benefits for hardware and software developers Adaptive SOMs benefit both hardware and software developers. For hardware developers, adaptive SOMs offer an off-the shelf, production-ready solution, saving significant development cost and time. These devices also allow hardware teams to change the design late in the process, vs. a SOM based on fixed silicon technology. For AI and software developers, adaptive computing is more accessible than ever. Xilinx has made sure to invest heavily in tool flows to ensure this is the case. The

Figure 2: Kria KV260 Vision AI Starter Kit

ecosystem partners. Xilinx offerings are open source accelerated applications, provided at no-charge, and range from smart camera and face detection to natural language processing with smart vision. The future is adaptive AI models will continue to evolve at a rapid pace. This means acceleration platforms must be adaptable to allow optimal implementation of AI techniques for today and tomorrow. Indeed, SOMs provide an ideal edge processing platform. When combined with adaptive SoCs, SOMs offer a comprehensive, production ready platform for AI-enabled edge applications. Companies that adopt these devices can reap the rewards of adaptive computing, benefitting from a unique combination of performance, flexibility, and rapid development time.

introduction of the Kria SOM portfolio takes this accessibility to the next level by coupling the hardware and software platform with production- ready vision accelerated applications. These turnkey applications eliminate all the FPGA hardware design work and only require software developers to integrate their custom AI models, application code, and optionally modify the vision pipeline – using familiar design environments, such as TensorFlow, Pytorch or Caffe frameworks, as well as C, C++, OpenCL™, and Python programming languages—enabled by the Vitis™ unified software development platform and libraries. With this new accelerated- application paradigm for software- based design, Xilinx also announced the first embedded app store for edge applications, offering customers a wide selection of apps for Kria SOMs from Xilinx and its

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