Vayyar Imaging has selected Cadence Design Systems’ Tensilica Vision DSP for its advanced millimeter wave 3D imaging solution. A high-resolution sensor that tracks the environment around it in real time without a camera, Vayyar’s system on a chip (SoC) covers imaging and radar bands from 3 GHz to 81 GHz with 72 transmitters and 72 receivers in a single chip. This enables the sensor to differentiate between objects and people, determine location while mapping large areas, and create a 3D image of the environment with very high levels of accuracy. The Tensilica Vision DSP enables Vayyar to execute complex imaging algorithms and process back-end radar signals on the edge in real time, on-chip, without the need for an external CPU.
Vayyar chose the Tensilica Vision DSP family for its high performance, vast instruction set, small core area, low power demands, and attractive performance/milliwatt (mW) profile compared to CPUs and GPUs. These unique attributes allow for running the full application layer inside the SoC, making complex imaging applications ultra-integrative and exceptionally cost-effective. Furthermore, using the Tensilica Vision DSP’s highly optimized compiler-profiler package and high-performance libraries, Vayyar is able to reduce development time while achieving desired performance, resulting in faster time to market.
In addition, the DSP’s programmable engine helps future-proof the design, providing flexibility to Vayyar’s customers, and the Tensilica Instruction Extension (TIE) language allows the addition of instructions to improve performance for customer-specific algorithms.
Vayyar has successfully collaborated with Cadence over several generations of IP cores, working in close cooperation with their development team. Incorporating the Tensilica Vision DSP into their SoC enables Vayyar to achieve low latency and high frame rates for the high-speed, time-critical solutions required by our target markets. In addition, flexibility proved key, as the high-quality Tensilica Vision DSP core was easy to integrate, with first-silicon success.
Tensilica Vision DSP is being used in multiple radar application areas today: making driving safer with more affordable automotive sensor processing, increasing the usability of industrial robots with people avoidance, enabling easier interaction with consumer products through gesture recognition, and lowering energy bills in commercial properties with occupancy detection. Vayyar’s innovative solution uses the Tensilica Vision DSP to process back-end radar signals in real time from multi-antenna array radar and generate a high-resolution 3D image. It delivers high performance and high-power efficiency compared to CPUs for both front-end and back-end radar signal processing.
The Tensilica Vision DSP family addresses a wide range of markets, offering high-performance and power-efficient DSPs to enable processing at the edge for rich, real-time experiences. The Vision P6 DSP is designed for general-purpose imaging and occasional-use AI / neural network inference for both fixed- and floating-point data-types, offering 4X the peak performance compared to its predecessor, the Vision P5 DSP.
The latest addition to the popular Vision DSP family, the Vision Q6 DSP offers 1.5X greater vision and AI performance compared to the Vision P6 DSP, and 1.25X better power efficiency at the Vision P6 DSP’s peak performance. Cadence also offers the Tensilica ConnX family of DSPs optimized for the full radar sensor-processing chain: from the front-end raw antenna data that requires complex arithmetic for FFTs and beamforming, to the back-end object detection and estimation that requires the precision that floating-point data-types provide.
