Texas Instruments launches six Arm Cortex-based vision processors: support for up to 12 cameras

CTOnews.com, March 20 / PRNewswire-FirstCall-Asianet /-- Texas Instruments (TI) announced a new series of six Arm Cortex-based vision processors that enable designers to add more visual and artificial intelligence (AI) processing capabilities at lower cost and higher energy efficiency in applications such as visual doorbells, machine vision and autonomous mobile robots.

The new family includes AM62A, AM68A, and AM69A processors and is supported by open source evaluation and model development tools and common software that can be programmed through the industry's common application programming interface (API), frameworks and models. With this platform of visual processors, software and tools, designers can easily develop and extend edge AI designs across multiple systems while reducing time to market.

When implementing visual processing and deep learning in low-power edge AI applications, Texas Instruments' new visual processors bring intelligence from the cloud to the real world by removing barriers to cost and design complexity.

These processors use the system on Chip (SoC) architecture, which supports extensive integration. Integrated components include Arm Cortex-A53 or Cortex-A72 central processing units, third-generation Texas Instruments image signal processors, internal memory, interfaces and hardware accelerators that provide AI processing capabilities of 1 trillion to 32 trillion operations per second (TOPS) for deep learning algorithms. (CTOnews.com Note: Tera Operations Per Second is a unit of processor computing power).

The visual processors in this series include:

AM62A3, AM62A3-Q1, AM62A7 and AM62A7-Q1, which can support one or two cameras less than 2W in applications such as doorbell cameras and smart retail systems. The series includes 1 TOPS vision processor AM62A3, which is low-cost in the industry.

AM68A can support one to eight cameras in applications such as machine vision, as well as AI processing up to 8 TOPS for advanced video analysis.

AM69A enables 32 TOPS AI processing for 1 to 12 cameras in high performance applications such as edge AI boxes, autonomous mobile robots and traffic surveillance systems.

Starting in the second quarter of 2023, designers will be able to reduce time to market for edge AI applications through the public beta version of Texas Instruments' free open source tool, Edge AI Studio. This Web-based and feature-rich tool allows users to quickly and easily develop and test AI models using self-created models and Texas Instruments optimized models, and these models can also be retrained using custom data.