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Software and tools in Lattice’s latest FPGA stack accelerate automation

Thu, May 13, 2021

Development of factory automation and industrial robotics can be accelerated with the Automate stack, says Lattice Semiconductor. The stack includes software tools, industrial IP cores, modular hardware development boards, and software-programmable reference designs and demos. All help developers simplify and accelerate development of robotics and scalable multi-channel motor control with predictive maintenance and real-time industrial networking, says the company.

The latest addition to Lattice’s low power FPGA-based solution stacks offers scalable motor control, which accelerates the development of flexible motor control systems, including a GUI-based user interface for system monitoring and control. There is also predictive maintenance which minimises machine downtime by monitoring multiple motors in a system.

Another feature is embedded real-time networking which implements an extensible sense and control system for a large number of devices using a Lattice Nexus FPGA as the central controller.

For security there is the Cyber Resiliency feature which enables a hardware root-of-trust that can detect, protect, and recover from a firmware-based attack in real-time.

The stack has easy to use software design methodology, says Lattice, with support for Lattice Propel for simplifying development of industrial automation systems with software/hardware co-processing using an embedded RISC-V processor.

Lattice Semiconductor provides low power, programmable technology to solve customer problems across the network, from the edge to the cloud, in the growing communications, computing, industrial, automotive, and consumer markets.

http://www.latticesemi.com

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Microchip adds device configuration platform to Trust suite

Wed, May 12, 2021

Microchip has added enhancements to its Trust Platform Design Suite (TPDS) with dedicated software for device configuration and onboarding to Microchip secure provisioning services for embedded security.

TPDS 2.0 software extends the company’s Trust Platform for CryptoAuthentication which is believed to be the first pre-provisioned platform for hardware-based secure elements to implement secure authentication.

The software enables Microchip partners to add use cases to its security solutions onboarding ecosystem and includes support for additional security solutions such as the TA100, the first cryptographic companion device for the automotive market.

It can take an experienced firmware engineer months to specify an application’s threat model and develop a security use case that encompasses all necessary measures related to secure authentication, secure boot, IP protection, and more. The two main challenges are configuring the device’s security boundaries and provisioning secrets including private keys as well as symmetric secrets and other forms of secret data.

The TPDS software simplifies the process of specifying an application’s threat model and developing a secure use case which includes all measures to secure authentication, secure boot and IP protection. This is achieved by providing pre-defined use cases addressing the most common market requirements.

It is available with Trust&GO and TrustFLEX programs which enable new secure projects to be prototyped in a matter of minutes says Microchip. At the same time customers are presented with options based on the size of their deployment, use case requirements, and how much customisation they need.

Using Trust&GO, devices are pre-defined and pre-provisioned, off-the-shelf, for secure cloud authentication in both TLS-based and LoRaWAN-based networks. Minimum order quantity (MOQ) is just 10 units.

TrustFLEX allows customers to use the program’s pre-configured devices either with default generic certificates or their own credentials (Custom PKI). There is a broader range of pre-defined uses cases than with Trust&GO.

To address the most demanding use cases, Microchip’s TrustCUSTOM family gives customers the freedom to fully define the secure authentication configuration and fully customise secure key storage.

The TPDS v2 has an integrated onboarding flow which allows a customer to select a security solution, validate its use case, prototype it, and then start the process of secure provisioning.

TPDS v2 also enables third-party partners to add their own use cases to improve customer options for secure element onboarding and security features. Partners include EBV Elektronik (part of the Avnet Group). EBV Elektronik enables TPDS v2 users to connect to the Avnet IoTConnect Cloud quickly and securely through the ATECC608B TrustFlex configuration using the EBV-IoT Secure Shield evaluation kit.

Other features of TPDS v2 are training videos and interactive application notes spanning a variety of use cases for onboarding security, users can develop applications based on the selected use cases, finalise the security solution configuration, and perform the secret key exchange. There is also the facility to procure verification samples and start production.

The Trust Platform Design Suite is supported on Windows and macOS environments. The TA100 configurator is only available for the Windows platform.

Microchip’s open-source Trust Platform Design Suite is available for download on Microchip’s website at no cost for Trust&GO and TrustFLEX flows. The site also allows access to training videos, interactive application notes, C code and other project support. TrustCUSTOM software extensions for TPDS are available under NDA.

http://www.microchip.com

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Reference IP accelerates creation of signal and data processing SoCs

Tue, May 11, 2021

Power signal and data processing SoCs can be created faster and for lower costs, says Sondrel, using its latest reference IP platform.

The SFA 300 reference IP is the latest addition to the. It is a semi-custom SoC design to which a customer’s IP can be added to create a bespoke solution for high performance data processing.

Each SFA 300 reference design has four CPU clusters. Several SFA 300s can be ganged together and synchronised via the PCIe interface to scale the processing performance. There is also the option to integrate accelerators and/or custom logic to further increase performance and minimise power requirements. Developers can use the SFA 300 to tailor designs for processing-intense applications such as 8K video, artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition for surveillance, smart factories, blockchain servers and medical data analysis.

An ASIC with four CPU clusters is complex to design,” explained Rowan Naylor, a principal engineering consultant at Sondrel. “Moving data around the chip without bottlenecks needs a network on chip, a multi-width data path, internal RAM, scaled and distributed across the design for optimal performance, and data conflict arbitration”. He also went on to explain that data security aspects are required in the Arm-based security sub-system, such as activity/intrusion detection. These function are in the SFA 300 IP platform, which allows engineers to reduce the design time and costs by up to 30 per cent, declared Naylor.

The SFA 300 framework design enables it to be scaled to suit the application as well as be the basis for different solutions of varied processing power capabilities. The four CPUs can be chosen to suit the processing power need by each of the four channels of the chip because the interconnects on and off the CPUs are standardised. This standardisation of interconnects on the boundaries of IP blocks and the rest of chip enables most other IP blocks such as memory to be also exchanged as required.

If the processing power required is greater than can be achieved by upgrading the processors, then several chips can be ganged together to form a cluster to achieve the processing power required with the limiting factor being the speed of inter-chip communications dropping as more chips are ganged together.

According to Sondrel, this is an inexpensive means of achieving a high-performance solution as it requires just one chip repeated several times rather than a more expensive, single chip solution. Typical performance figures are 4 tera operations per second (TOPS) for each channel for AI and 400 giga operations per second for each channel for DSP.

The SFA 300 can be used for image and video analysis, for example. For a static image, it could find a face or count the number of blood cells on a sample slide and a neural net could provide more sophisticated recognition for data analysis, explained the company. Treating a video as a series of images, it could deduce the direction and speed of an object of interest.

Another use case could be heavy duty number crunching such as for block chains and cryptocurrency mining.

The SPA 300 has low power consumption, making it suitable for battery powered applications, such as a drone. The powerful image processing capabilities and AI enable it to be used as an autonomous drone controller to fly the drone.

The SPA 300 is the third in the company’s Architecting the future IP platforms.

Sondrel offers a full turnkey service that turns designs into fully tested, shipping silicon.

http://www.sondrel.com

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Impulse Embedded supports AI processing with Nvidia Jetson TX2 NX SBC

Tue, May 11, 2021

Offering more than twice the AI processing performance of the Jetson Nano, Nvidia’s Jetson TX2 NX single board computer (SBC) is designed for mass-market articial intelligence (AI) platforms. The SBC is now available from Impulse Embedded. According to the industrial computing systems and solutions provider, the Jetson TX2 NX delivers the next step in AI performance for entry-level embedded and edge products.

It has the same form factor and is pin compatible with the Jetson Nano, but offers more than twice the AI processing performance at 1.33tera floating operations per second (TFlops) compared to 487GFlops.

The Nvidia Jetson TX2 NX SBC combines a dual-core Nvidia Denver 2 64-bit CPU, a quad-core Arm Cortex-A57 MPCore processor and a 256-core Pascal GPU that can operate at up to 1.3GHz. It also has 4Gbyte of 128-bit LPDDR4 memory and 16Gbyte of eMMC 5.1 flash storage. There is also PCI Express expansion, Gigabit Ethernet, a USB3.1 Gen 1 port and video output via HDMI or DisplayPort. The SBC is fully capable of encoding one 4K stream at 60frames per second in HEVC/H.265 or as many as 14 streams in 1080p at 30frames per second in HEVC/H.264.

The TX2 NX, like all Jetson modules and developers’ kits are supported by Nvidia’s JetPack software stack for deployment anywhere on any Jetson device.

Impulse Embedded’s sales director, Robert Plant, acknowledged that developing industrial AI computing can be “difficult, costly and time-consuming”. The company has embedded systems capabilities to help customers create reliable, repeatable and robust systems to meet budget and time constraints. “With our team of in-house engineers and specialists, all with decades of experience, we can offer fully deployable embedded edge AI computing solutions straight out of the box,” he said.

http://www.impulse-embedded.co.uk

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Software and tools in Lattice’s latest FPGA stack accelerate automation

Microchip adds device configuration platform to Trust suite

Reference IP accelerates creation of signal and data processing SoCs

Impulse Embedded supports AI processing with Nvidia Jetson TX2 NX SBC

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