Renesas launches a single-chip RZ/V2H MPU for high-performance robotic applications.
2024-03-01
Renesas Electronics has launched a new product for high-performance robotic applications, the RZ/V2H, further expanding its popular RZ family of microprocessors (MPUs). The RZ/V2H offers the highest level of performance within the product family, enabling vision AI and real-time control functions.
The RZ/V2H microprocessor integrates an AI accelerator, providing exceptional efficiency and high real-time performance.
Equipped with Renesas’ next-generation proprietary AI accelerator, DRP-AI3 (Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor-AI3), it delivers an energy efficiency of 10 TOPS/W, which is up to ten times higher than earlier models. Additionally, the use of pruning technology in the DRP-AI3 accelerator significantly enhances AI computational efficiency, boosting AI inference performance to 80 TOPS. This performance improvement allows engineers to process vision AI applications directly on edge AI devices without relying on cloud computing platforms. The details of the new DRP-AI3 acceleration technology were recently revealed at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2024) in San Francisco, USA.
The RZ/V2H integrates four Arm® Cortex®-A55 CPU cores operating at a maximum frequency of 1.8GHz (for Linux application processing), two Cortex-R8 cores operating at 800MHz (for high-performance real-time processing), and a Cortex-M33 sub-core. By integrating these cores into a single chip, the product can effectively manage vision AI and real-time control tasks, making it an ideal choice for future demanding robotic applications. Thanks to the lower power consumption of the RZ/V2H, engineers can design smaller, lower-cost, and more reliable systems without the need for cooling fans and other heat dissipation components.
OpenCV is the open-source industry standard library for computer vision processing. Renesas has developed an OpenCV accelerator using its proprietary DRP technology, which significantly accelerates the processing speed of OpenCV; the speed increase can be up to 16 times compared to CPU processing. The combination of DRP-AI3 and the OpenCV accelerator enhances AI computation and image processing algorithms, enabling efficient and real-time execution of virtual SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) technology used in applications such as robotic vacuum cleaners.
To accelerate development, Renesas has also released “AI Applications” (a pre-trained model library for various cases) and an AI SDK (Software Development Kit) for rapid AI application development. By running these software on the evaluation board of RZ/V2H, engineers can easily evaluate AI applications at an early stage of the design process, even without extensive AI knowledge.
