O.C.E. Technology has today presented and demonstrated its new artificial intelligence (AI) chip for embedded vision applications at the 2nd European Workshop on On-Board Data Processing. This virtual event is being hosted by the European Space Agency (ESA), the Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace Centre (DLR).
The new AI chip called hisaor, from the Irish phrase for artificial intelligence (intleacht shaorga), incorporates eight GPUs and 8 neural network accelerators as an AI co-processing unit. Four ARM Cortex-A9 processors are the primary processing unit for the main operating system. Hisaor also includes multiple on-chip camera interfaces and video encoding and decoding units along with multiple high-speed bus interfaces.
Hisaor Development Board
Barry Kavanagh, CEO, O.C.E. Technology, said, “Hisaor will enable new space applications to process high-resolution video and hyperspectral on satellites minimising download data quantities and providing faster response to terrestrial data collected from onboard sensors.”
He added, “The hisaor development environment is based on VeriSilicon’s Vivante Acuity™ software tools which make it easy for embedded developers to port their AI models trained in the cloud and execute these models on the chip. I see this as one of the main strengths of the product.”
hisaor AI chip
Hisaor was a joint development with Zhuhai Orbita Aerospace Science & Technology Co. Ltd. (300053.SZ) and is based on a collection of mature IP from leading companies. Work has also started on porting OCE’s safety-approved real-time operating system OCEOS to the hisaor platform.
O.C.E. Technology is also actively targeting the new technology at non-space applications such as autonomous vehicles, medical devices and intelligent manufacturing.
