SemiWiki: High-Level Synthesis at the Edge

Excerpt from article: “High-Level Synthesis at the Edge”

Custom AI acceleration continues to gather steam. In the cloud, Alibaba has launched its own custom accelerator, following Amazon and Google. Facebook is in the game too and Microsoft has a significant stake in Graphcore. Intel/Mobileye have a strong lock on edge AI in cars and wireless infrastructure builders are adding AI capabilities to small cells and base stations for 5G. All of these applications depend on a lot of flexibility and future-proofing for long-term relevance in rapidly evolving environments.

But there are many applications, probably accounting for the great majority of units, for which power, cost or transparent use models are much more important metrics. An agricultural monitor in a field in the middle of nowhere, a microwave voice controller, traffic sensors distributed across a large city. For these a general-purpose solution, even a general-purpose AI solution, may be overkill. An application-specific AI function would be much more compelling.

Read the entire article on SemiWiki originally published on February 19th, 2020.