Edgecortix Inc. (Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan, CEO: Sakyasingha Dasgupta, hereinafter called “EdgeCortix”) has signed a partnership with PALTEK Corporation (Headquarters: Yokohama, Japan, President: Naohide Yabuki, Securities Code: 7587, hereinafter called “PALTEK”), which sells and designs semiconductors and related products. Since its founding in 1982, PALTEK has used FPGAs to provide product development support and technical support to Japanese electronics manufacturers. The company’s strength, cultivated through its semiconductor sales, lies in its ability to support customers from proposal through to mass production, and along with integrated design services.
Through this partnership, EdgeCortix will provide PALTEK, with their low-latency, energy-efficient hardware IP (intellectual property) Dynamic Neural Accelerator® and MERA ™ compilers, to be implemented on the Xilinx Accelerator Card “Alveo ™ U50 Data Center Accelerator Card” *1. This enables high-throughput, real-time and low power edge AI applications in areas such as ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems), autonomous driving, robots, smart cities, drones, industry 4.0, etc.
Background and outline of this collaboration
In recent years, deep learning, which is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks, has realized dramatic improvements in accuracy in many fields such as machine vision and voice processing. However, majority of the current practical applications are based on cloud-infrastructure using GPUs. In general for edge computing, there are many use cases that cannot be processed efficiently in the cloud due to challenges arising from communication volume, load, and latency during inference, with the performance of inference processing on edge devices using streaming data becoming a critical issue.
EdgeCortix is a fabless semiconductor design company, co-designing the hardware and software for low latency artificial intelligence inference processors on embedded and telco edge devices. Through this distributor agreement, EdgeCortix’s unique AI hardware IP, the Dynamic Neural Accelerator® *2, can be implemented on the Xilinx Alveo™ U50 FPGA accelerator cards provided by PALTEK. This enables ultra-high speed and reduced power consumption (as compared to CPUs and GPUs), while processing of complicated arithmetic operations along with large amounts of data, typical in deep learning.
Against this background, by combining PALTEK’s long standing experience in design and sales of electronic equipment and technical support from proposal to mass production, along with EdgeCortix’s edge AI acceleration focused technology, we can rapidly bring high performance AI inference capabilities to edge devices. Additionally, this partnership will help provide easily deployable edge AI solutions to companies and system integrators without the need for deep know how on FPGA hardware or software.
Main Initiatives / Collaboration Measures
Establishing this distributor agreement, we will combine the strengths of both companies, accelerate the development and mass production of edge AI solutions that utilize FPGAs, and propose and execute efficient AI applications for meeting the needs of the market. Specifically, solutions that integrate EdgeCortix’s Dynamic Neural Accelerator® IP DNA-F200 & DNA-F100 (FPGA bitstreams) with Alveo ™ U50 FPGA accelerator cards, along with EdgeCortix’s MERA ™ dataflow compiler will be offered.
Naohide Yabuki, President of PALTEK Corporation, had the following to say about this partnership:
“Currently, various AI services are on the market, but most of them are processed on CPUs and GPUs in the cloud. However, there is a need for low latency in fields such as robots, smart cities, and Industry 4.0, which we are targeting. Along with this, edge AI with FPGAs is increasing as many customers demand low power consumption and long-term supply. EdgeCortix focuses on edge AI and provides solutions specialized for lower latency and lower power consumption. We are very much looking forward to achieve synergistic effects by proposing such edge AI focused solutions together with the Xilinx products we handle. “
Sakyasingha Dasgupta, CEO of Edgecortix, Inc., had the following to say about this partnership:
“We are pleased to establish this partnership with PALTEK Corporation and are confident that it will enable growth in edge AI hardware acceleration business involving FPGAs. We feel very strongly that, with complete integrated solutions leveraging our unique technology, together with PALTEK Corporation, we can enhance the practical application of edge AI products and the overall customer experience. Since 1982, PALTEK Corporation has a wealth of experience in electronic product development and sales, supporting customers from proposal stages to mass production. Leveraging this experience, we will offer our AI processor IP and compiler technology for extremely fast inference on edge devices and datacenters using FPGAs, requiring very little effort for solution deployment.”