Microchip Expands PolarFire® FPGA and SoC Solution Stacks with New Offerings for Medical Imaging and Smart Robotics

Microchip Expands PolarFire® FPGA and SoC Solution Stacks with New Offerings for Medical Imaging and Smart Robotics

Blog Article

The rise of IoT, industrial automation, smart robotics, and the proliferation of medical imaging solutions at the intelligent edge have made designing power- and thermally-constrained applications more complex than ever.  To tackle the critical challenges of accelerating product development cycles and simplifying complicated processes, Microchip Technology (Nasdaq: MCHP) has introduced the PolarFire® FPGA and SoC solution stacks for smart robotics and medical imaging.  These new offerings build upon Microchip’s existing smart embedded vision, industrial edge, and intelligent edge communication stacks.

 



 

The solution stacks feature firmware and IP cores for AI-assisted 4K60 computer vision, a diverse array of ready-to-use sensor and camera interfaces, and integrated hardware for high-speed Ethernet protocols.  Real-time ROS-2 compatible cores support robotics tasks such as perception and coordinate transformation.  The stacks also provide time-sensitive industrial networking protocols for OPC/UA, rich operating system support, and asymmetric processing commonly utilized in industrial automation.  Software design kits allow for high levels of customization and support various development environments centered around C/C++, RTL, and popular machine learning frameworks, including the SmartHLS™ IDE, VectorBlox™ Accelerator SDK, and the Libero® SoC Design Suite, which is certified for applications requiring IEC61503 SIL 3 functional safety.  These solution stacks combine the industry's most power-efficient and secure mid-range PolarFire FPGAs and PolarFire SoC FPGAs, creating a rich mix of hardware and software solutions with cybersecurity protections that empower system designers to innovate in medical imaging and robotics applications.

 

“Our customers urgently need to drive significant innovation in secure, functionally safe, AI-assisted industrial automation and portable medical imaging that delivers unprecedented compute power in compact, thermally stressed environments that are vulnerable to cybersecurity threats,” said Shakeel Peera, vice president of marketing and strategy for Microchip’s FPGA business unit.  “To that end, we are providing developers in these sectors the ability to utilize power-efficient hardware and customizable solution stacks, with the ultimate goal of rapidly deploying intelligent medical imaging and autonomous robots.”

 

One notable example of Microchip’s innovative solution stacks is the recently announced PolarFire FPGA Ethernet Sensor Bridge, which works with the NVIDIA® Holoscan sensor processing platform.  This bridge facilitates real-time sensor data connection to NVIDIA Holoscan, as well as the NVIDIA IGX and NVIDIA Jetson platforms for edge AI and robotics.  The Sensor Bridge opens up new edge-to-cloud applications, enables AI/ML inferencing, and promotes the adoption of AI in medical, industrial, and automotive markets.