ArchiTek has licenced a risc-V processor core from SiFive to complete its AiOnIc proof-of-concept artificial intelligence processor.
www.electronicsweekly.com, Mar. 18, 2021 –
"SiFive E3-Series Core IP enabled us to hit our performance, power, and area targets, while SiFive Core Designer and SiFive partner DTS-Insight helped reduce our development time," said ArchiTek CEO and CTO Shuichi Takada.
AiOnIc's architecture, called 'aIPE' is designed for use in fan-less edge AI applications. ArchiTek, which is based in Osaka, claims that "aIPE architecture reduces processing time for simultaneous localisation and mapping [SLAM] to 1/20th of the time seen for general-purpose CPUs, and improves the operating speed of perceptual computing using OpenPose for human pose estimation by 3.8x versus GPUs. The dynamic configuration capabilities of the AiOnIc chip enable various algorithms to be supported and can be used for autonomous vehicles, cybersecurity systems, robotics, and security cameras."
The AiOnIc chip includes built-in engines for: signal processing, general-purpose sort, multi-functional DMA, inverse matrix operation, FFTs, general-purpose matrix multiply-add, and a general-purpose GPU.