Renesas Electronics Corporation has expanded its AI-capable RZ/V Series of microprocessors (MPUs), with a new device that enables AI processing of image data from multiple cameras, offering a new level of highly accurate image recognition for vision AI applications. Equipped with two 64-bit Arm® Cortex®-A53 cores, the new device is capable of delivering high computing performance with a maximum operating frequency of 1GHz. The RZ/V2MA features a proprietary low power DRP-AI (Dynamically Reconfigurable Processor) accelerator which can process vision AI at 1 TOPS/W (tera operations per second, per watt) class performance.

The RZ/V2MA device offers high-speed interfaces such as Ethernet, USB, and PCI Express that allow image input from multiple external cameras. In addition to the DRP-AI accelerator, the RZ/V2MA includes an OpenCV accelerator that allows rule-based image processing simultaneously. These features bring highly accurate image recognition capabilities for machine vision products such as AI-equipped gateways, video servers, security gates, POS terminals and robotic arms. The new RZ/V2MA offers a full suite of development tools to aid vision AI system design.

In addition to the existing DRP-AI Translator, the new device adds DRP-AI TVM (Note 1), which is based on the open-source deep learning compiler Apache TVM technology (Note 2). While DRP AI Translator is designed to convert AI models into DRP-AI executables, the DRP-AI TVM compiler lets the DRP-AI accelerator work together with the CPU, allowing DRP-AI to convert and generate more AI models than ever before. As a first phase, Renesas supports ONNX and PyTorch AI models and plans to support Tensorflow in the future.