Renesas SoC Pairs Vision With AI

Renesas’s new AI RZ/V2H embedded SoC offers a meaningful increase in AI performance and efficiency to target high-performance robots that inhabit factory floors and smart homes and buildings. The RZ/V2H is the first SoC to feature Rensas’s new AI acceleration technology, DRP-AI3, which gives the chip significantly more AI inference capability than any of the previous devices in the RZ/V series, making it competitive in applications that need vision and more intelligence.

The RZ/V2H features a heterogenous architecture that includes four Cortex-M55 CPU cores for application processing, two Cortex-R8 CPUs for real-time processing, and a Cortex-M33 CPU for system management. It also incorporates two engines based on the company Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor (DRP) technology to accelerate processing of AI and non-AI algorithms.

The hardware acceleration capability of the RZ/V2H yields about 8× the AI performance and twice the power efficiency of previous members of the RZ/V series, all of which feature the company’s first-generation AI accelerator. Renesas maintains that the effective gains are several times higher when factoring in added support for INT8 quantization and Renesas’s new proprietary technology for AI model pruning.

The RZ/V2H is available now, starting at around $100, more than twice the cost of any other device in the RZ/V series. The RZ/V2H targets higher-end edge applications that use computer vision and could benefit from more intelligence such as autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) working on factory floors.