The Ideal Solution for AI Applications - Speedcore eFPGA

By Achronix Semiconductor Corporation

Introduction and Background

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the way the world works, opening up countless opportunities in commercial and industrial systems. Applications span diverse markets such as autonomous driving, medical diagnostics, home appliances, industrial automation, adaptive websites and financial analytics. Even the communications infrastructure linking these systems together is moving towards automated self-repair and optimization. These new architectures will perform functions such as load balancing and allocating resources such as wireless channels and network ports based on predictions learned from experience.

These applications demand high performance and, in many cases, low latency to respond successfully to realtime changes in conditions and demands. They also require power consumption to be as low as possible, rendering unusable, solutions that underpin machine-learning in cloud servers where power and cooling are plentiful. A further requirement is for these embedded systems to be always on and ready to respond even in the absence of a network connection to the cloud. This combination of factors calls for a change in the way that hardware is designed.