Mipsology’s new Zebra FPGA IP now available

Mipsology has announced the availability of Zebra FPGA IP, a solution that has been developed to accelerate the development and deployment of FPGA and adaptive SoC-based machine learning systems.

The company, an AI software innovator, said that the Zebra FPGA IP has been optimised to power edge applications spanning industrial automation, security, autonomous vehicles and smart cities. The Zebra IP is currently being used by early access partners and is expected to ship early in Q3.

The Zebra neural network accelerator can be combined with ARM CPUs and GPUs, and video decoders on Xilinx multiprocessor systems on chips (MPSoCs) to deliver complex processing beyond most conventional SoCs. Zebra FPGA IP uses only a part of the FPGA, offering a much higher density of computation, enabling designers to integrate their own functions and fully use ARM CPUs/GPUs, delivering high performance and low latency solutions.

“Mipsology’s solutions continue to lead the path for AI on FPGAs,” said Ramine Roane, vice president of AI Software, Xilinx. “When combined with ARM CPUs and GPU, as well as video decoding, the new Zebra FPGA IP product enables an AI platform, expanding our ability to deliver a superior AI inference solution for our edge and embedded customers.”

The Zebra FPGA IP is based on the proven core technology of Mipsology’s flagship Zebra software. It takes TensorFlow, PyTorch or ONNX CNN models and is able to map them seamlessly to the target system, while not sacrificing accuracy for the edge. As Zebra can process many kinds of neural networks, the application can continue to evolve without the need to reprogram the FPGA at a low level.

Compared to GPUs and ASICs the combination of Zebra FPGA IP and the ability to program FPGAs at the hardware level is seen, according to Mipsology, as providing a far more ‘malleable’ platform for machine learning-based systems at the edge.

“Zebra IP has the same features and behaviour as our Zebra inference accelerator running on PCIe cards, but in a much more flexible format, so that developers can enhance their systems with additional capabilities,” said Ludovic Larzul, CEO and founder of Mipsology. “They can integrate complex functions around Zebra to create smart systems deployed everywhere. The possibilities are endless.”