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EdgeReady provides touchless access control via face recognition

Mon, Nov 09, 2020

Based on its i.MX RT106F crossover microcontroller, NXP offers EdgeReady for the IoT, with a license for facial recognition software to provide touchless access control.

OEMs can use EdgeReady to quickly, easily and inexpensively add vision-based touchless access control, says NXP. The microcontroller and AI/ML-based face recognition software makes possible face recognition with liveness checking using infra red and RGB cameras, flash and SDRAM at a total cost of less than US$10, says the company.

It can be used to implement face recognition for authenticating and operating secure machines, equipment, and access points for hotels, public buildings and homes, for example, doors, locks, amenities, lifts, garage doors and security systems.

The infra red camera operates with a visible light (RGB) camera to distinguish a real person from a photograph. This prevents unauthorised access without the need for an expensive 3D structured light or time of flight (ToF) camera, says NXP.

It responds in 0.5 seconds. Face detection, quality check, liveness detection and face recognition are all conducted in less than 500 milliseconds at the microcontroller-based edge instead of the cloud, to make access systems convenient.

It also enhances data privacy by allowing all personal biometric data to remain on the device at the edge. This helps address privacy regulations as well as the concerns of consumers to protect data.

The battery life is maximised with a fast microcontroller boot up time. The device enters power saving mode when not in use. A fast recognition time is combined with the microcontrollers low active power, says NXP, to further meet low power system requirements.

A customisable smartphone or PC application can enable biometric models to be sent to remote locks and other devices for controlled access in hospitality, smart building and smart home applications.

NXP also offers the i.MX RT106F-based development kit (SLN-VIZNAS-IOT) to accelerate time to market. It contains all the software and hardware information to complete designs in as little as six months, says NXP. In addition to negating integration and coding, the NXP EdgeReady IoT for secure face recognition based on the i.MX RT106F development kit includes schematics, bill of materials (BoM), board layout and ready-to-use face biometric registration application.

The SLN-VIZNAS-IOT secure face recognition development kit is available now from NXP and authorised distributors.

The i.MX RT106F microcontroller is available now. It includes a license to use the NXP face recognition SDK. The device is available in consumer and industrial temperature grades.

http://www.nxp.com

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Panel PC PCap HMIs have multi-touch operation

Tue, Nov 03, 2020

A series of 21.5 and 23.6 inch projective capacitive (PCap) multi-touch screens for monitor or panel PCs from Portwell are powered by AllWinner A83T Octa-core Cortex A7 CPU to provide necessary basic computing power or Intel Atom Apollo Lake x5-E3930 processors.

The Lead-PD, -PND and -PPC series of panel PC products are designed for the IoT market. The robust, functional and flexible multi-touch human machine interfaces (HMIs) have HD 10-point PCap touch screen and are slim and bezel-free. They also have an IP65 water- and dust-proof front panel.

The 10-point multi-touch display supports a full set of gestures such as zooming in and out, panning or rotating to allow users a new way to control and interact with what’s on the screen, says Portwell.

The Lead series can be used in smart retail applications include digital signage, recognition, customised advertisements/ promotions, merchandise locations, self-checkout, and delivery. They can also be used in kiosk applications, such as point of interest, point of information in hospitality, hotel or restaurant locations, transportation such as parking lot, train station, airport; library, exhibition hall, government infrastructure, industrial or factory automation, facility management, intralogistics or smart warehouses.

Within the series are the Lead-PD series, a touch display with multi-touch function, the Lead-PND series, which is an Arm-based flat panel PC that supports the Android operating system, and there is the Lead-PPC series, utilising Intel Atom Dual Core processor compatible with Windows 10 IoT, Linux, and Android operating systems.

All three models have display sizes of 21.5 or 23.6 inches and backshell colour options in black flame-retardant plastics. They all have a full HD 1920 x 1080 resolution wide-screen display and a 16:9 ration panel. They also all have PCap and 10-point multi-touch operation and are constructed to a fanless and bezel-free design. Mounting option are standalone or VESA 75 x 75mm. The models in the Lead series are certified to CE (EN 55032 and EN 55024), FCC 47CFR Part 15 Subpart B and EN 60068-2-6 for vibration and EN 60068-2-27 shock absorption.

https://www.portwell.eu

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Accelerator card by Untether AI delivers up to two Peta OPS for AI inference

Fri, Oct 30, 2020

AI workloads for inference require increasing amounts of compute resources, far outstripping the gains available to traditional CPU and GPU architectures, says Untether AI. It has unveiled the tsunAImi accelerator cards which is powered by the runAI devices. Untether AI says its use of at-memory computation, breaks through the barriers of traditional von Neumann architectures, to offer industry-leading compute density with power and price efficiency.

AI accelerators are used in data centres and Untether AI says that it focuses on inference acceleration, transferring the weights and activations between external memory, on-chip caches to the computing element to maximise power efficiency. Untether AI is able to deliver two Peta operations per second (OPS) in a standard PCI-Express card form factor.

“For AI inference in cloud and datacenters, compute density is king, said Arun Iyengar, CEO of Untether AI. “Untether AI is ushering in the Peta OPS era to accelerate AI inference workloads at scale with unprecedented efficiency,” he added.

The tsunAImu accelerator card is based on the company’s runAI200 devices. They are tailored for inference acceleration and operate using integer data types and a batch mode of 1. The at-memory compute architecture features a memory bank of 385kbytes of SRAM with a 2D array of 512 processing elements. There are 511 banks per chip and each device offers 200Mbyte of memory and operate at up to 502 Tera OPS in “sport” mode. It may also be configured for maximum efficiency, offering eight TOPs per watt in “eco” mode.

The runAI200 devices are manufactured by Untethered AI, using a cost-effective, mainstream 16nm process.

The tsunAImi accelerator cards are powered by four runAI200 devices, providing more than two times any currently available PCIe cards, says Untethered AI. This compute power translates into over 80,000 frames per second of ResNet-50 v 1.5 throughput at batch=1. This is three times the throughput of its nearest competitor. For natural language processing, tsunAImi accelerator cards can process more than 12,000 queries per second (qps) of BERT-base, four times faster than any announced product.

The Untether AI imAIgineTM software development kit (SDK) provides an automated path to running networks with push-button quantisation, optimisation, physical allocation and multi-chip partitioning. The imAIgine SDK frees data scientists from having to perform low-level optimisation tasks and instead spend time in developing models. The imAIgine SDK also provides an extensive visualisation toolkit, cycle-accurate simulator, and an easily integrated runtime API.

The imAIgine SDK is currently in early access with select customers and partners. The tsunAImi accelerator card is sampling now and will be commercially available in Q1 2021.

http://www.untether.ai

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Pre-certified modules accelerate time to market, says Silicon Labs

Thu, Oct 29, 2020

Bluetooth, Zigbee, Thread and multi-protocol modules from Silicon Labs reduce time-to-market for secure smart home, building and industrial automation applications.

The pre-certified wireless modules are claimed to be the only modules in the industry with full stack support for multi-protocol solutions to enable commercial and consumer IoT applications. y offer package options and integrated device security.

“Silicon Labs has mastered the challenges that come with adding wireless connectivity to IoT devices,” said Matt Saunders, vice president of IoT marketing and applications at Silicon Labs. The modules allow IoT device makers to get pre-certified and secure wireless devices quickly to market.

The integrated modules are available in multiple package options including system in package (SiP) and traditional PCB versions. SiP modules contain miniaturised components that remove the need for complicated RF design and certification by opening space-constrained IoT designs to module-based solutions, says Silicon Labs. PCB modules enable flexible pin access and additional options to extend RF performance.

The xGM210PB features Secure Vault, the ARM PSA Level 2-certified IoT device security, as well as dynamic multi-protocol support for Bluetooth, Zigbee, and OpenThread and supports Wi-Fi co-existence. It is optimised for IoT applications, such as connected lighting, gateways, voice assistants and smart meter in-home displays, xGM210PB modules offer up to +20dBM output power and better than -104dBm sensitivity.

The BGM220 is one of the world’s smallest Bluetooth modules, says Silicon Labs, and the first to support Bluetooth Direction Finding. The integrated, pre-certified Bluetooth 5.2 module delivers up to 10 years’ operation on a coin cell battery, making it suitable for appliances, asset tags, beacons, portable medical, fitness, and Bluetooth mesh low-power nodes.

The MGM220 is a low-power, low-cost module for lighting controls, building and industrial automation sensors as well as Zigbee Green Power and energy harvesting applications.

Finally, the BGX220 Xpress includes an on-board Bluetooth stack, Xpress command interface and pre-programmed cable replacement firmware to deliver serial to Bluetooth LE with no need for firmware development. The modules are suitable for industrial applications including human machine interface (HMI) devices, addressing size, safety, and environmental challenges.

The modules are supported in the free-of-charge Silicon Labs Simplicity Studio 5 integrated development environment (IDE), which has software stacks, application demos and mobile apps, network analyser and patented energy profiler. Developers can also use simple APIs from Silicon Labs Xpress modules.

Samples, production quantities and development kits for all four modules are available now.

http://www.silabs.com

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EdgeReady provides touchless access control via face recognition

Panel PC PCap HMIs have multi-touch operation

Accelerator card by Untether AI delivers up to two Peta OPS for AI inference

Pre-certified modules accelerate time to market, says Silicon Labs

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