Artosyn Microelectronics, a leading provider of AI SoCs for drones and other sophisticated applications, finds itself at the intersection of hardware architecture and software development.
“Our customers are advancing the state of AI programming every day,” said Shen Sha, Senior R&D Manager of Artosyn’s AI Chip Department. “They need early access to the hardware to develop their software. It’s imperative.”
Since 2015, Artosyn has specialised in Image Signal Processors (ISPs) and Neural Processing Units (NPUs), highly advanced ASIC devices that must meet the demanding requirements of low-power and high-performance. These systems represent the most advanced generation of controllers today, employing artificial intelligence for such tasks as object detection, object classification, and object tracking. Artosyn’s chips are at the heart of the latest generation of UAVs (drones), as well as being used in smart surveillance systems, robots, autonomous vehicles, and more.
These are designs of enormous size and complexity, and verifying their correct operation presents its own challenges. “We’ve used many of S2C’s FPGA development systems including their single and dual Prodigy VU440 and UV19P systems,” explains Sha. “We were able to successfully complete the validation of several complex chips in the hundred-million gate range quickly and efficiently.”
But validating hardware still leaves millions of lines of code to test and verify. As a company dedicated to the customer experience, Artosyn looks for creative ways to help: “In some cases we’ve used the large capacity FPGA-based systems from S2C to directly build a prototype for the customer’s evaluation,” said Sha. “This really accelerates their software development process.”
Sharing the power of S2C’s Prodigy VU440 enabled both companies to leverage a unique form of cooperation – Artosyn was able to swiftly validate their 100-million gate design, and their customer gained access to the hardware critical to furthering their development schedule. Moreover, Artosyn benefits from additional insight by working so closely with their customer; knowledge that helps drive improvements in their own designs. It’s a win for both firms.
S2C specialises in providing leading-edge prototyping platforms for a broad range of design sizes and applications. Built around the world’s largest and fastest FPGAs – such as the Xilinx UltraScale+ VU19P, and the Intel Stratix 10 – S2C’s Prodigy series can scale up to accommodate the largest designs in the hyperscale class. With a rich library of memories, daughter cards, and interface modules, Prodigy systems can be quickly adapted and configured for any purpose.
