Products of the Week: March 11, 2024

March 11, 2024

Here's this week's selection of some of the most interesting new products that have been launched of late.

Microprocessor Empowers Next-Gen Robotics with Vision AI and Real-Time Control

Targeting high-performance robotics applications, Renesas Electronics expanded its RZ Family of microprocessors (MPUs) with the RZ/V2H, which enables both vision AI and real-time control capabilities. Leveraging the latest Renesas proprietary AI accelerator, the DRP (Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor)-AI3, delivers 10 TOPS/W power efficiency, a 10x improvement over previous models. Pruning technology in the DRP-AI3 accelerator improves AI computing efficiency, boosting inference performance up to 80 TOPS, powering vision AI applications directly at the edge without relying on cloud-computing platforms.

Features include four Arm Cortex-A55 CPU cores with a maximum operating frequency of 1.8 GHz for Linux application processing, two Cortex-R8 cores running at 800 MHz for high-performance real-time processing, and one Cortex-M33 as a sub-core. The device can effectively manage both vision AI and real-time control tasks, while eliminating the need for cooling fans and other heat-dissipating components due to its power efficiency. The OpenCV Accelerator speeds up the processing of OpenCV, an open-source industry standard library for computer vision processing, enhancing both AI computing and image processing algorithms.

Alix Paultre | Editor-at-Large, Microwaves & RF

Alix is Editor-at-Large for Microwaves & RF.

An Army veteran, Alix Paultre was a signals intelligence soldier on the East/West German border in the early ‘80s, and eventually wound up helping launch and run a publication on consumer electronics for the U.S. military stationed in Europe. Alix first began in this industry in 1998 at Electronic Products magazine, and since then has worked for a variety of publications, most recently as Editor-in-Chief of Power Systems Design.

Alix currently lives in Wiesbaden, Germany.