Renesas — RZ_V2H Microprocessors

Renesas has introduced the RZ/V2H series of microprocessors, which provide the vision AI and real-time control capabilities required in the latest high-performance robotics and edge AI applications. 

The microprocessor comes with a new generation of the Renesas proprietary AI accelerator, dynamically reconfigurable processor DRP-AI3: this highly efficient AI engine produces 10 TOPS/W, a 10-fold improvement in power consumption over previous models. Additionally, pruning technology employed in the DRP-AI3 accelerator substantially improves AI computing efficiency, boosting AI inference performance up to 80 TOPS. Since the RZ/V2H consumes less power than earlier AI processors, it eliminates the need for cooling fans and other heat-dissipating components. This means that engineers can design systems that are smaller, less expensive, and more reliable. 

The enhanced performance of the RZ/V2H also enables the processing of vision AI applications locally in an embedded device without relying on the AI inference capabilities of a cloud computing service.  

The RZ/V2H incorporates 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 CPU as a sub-core. Integrating these cores into a single chip, the RZ/V2H can manage both vision AI and real-time control tasks, making it ideal for demanding robotics applications.  

Renesas has applied its proprietary DRP technology to the development of the OpenCV Accelerator which speeds up the processing of OpenCV, an open-source industry-standard library for computer vision processing. Processing via the OpenCV Accelerator is up to 16 times faster than CPU processing. The combination of the DRP-AI3 and the OpenCV Accelerator enhances both AI computing and image processing algorithms, enabling the power-efficient, real-time execution of simultaneous visual location and mapping operations, used in applications such as robotic vacuum cleaners. 

To accelerate development, Renesas has also released AI Applications, a library of pre-trained models for various use cases, and an AI software development kit (SDK) for rapid development of AI applications. By running these software packages on the RZ/V2H evaluation board, engineers can evaluate AI applications early in the design process, and develop proofs-of-concept easily even without extensive knowledge of AI.