At this year’s International Embedded Exhibition (Embedded World), Lattice’s Senior Vice President of R&D, Steve Douglass, delivered a keynote speech discussing the significance of flexibility and adaptability in both software and hardware aspects of embedded system design, which helps to keep up with important technology trends today and in the future. This article provides a brief review of that speech.
Our industry is undergoing profound technological changes that fundamentally reshape our world. The global proliferation of 5G has laid the groundwork for an explosion of low-power, low-latency interconnected devices, with almost all devices and systems connecting to the Internet. We are not only connecting billions of devices to the Internet but also equipping them with more sensors—cameras, microphones, radar, lidar, accelerometers—that enhance the devices’ ability to perceive the surrounding world. The development of computer vision and edge computing further strengthens these devices’ capabilities, making them an indispensable part of our environment. These devices will generate vast amounts of AI data, leading to an explosive growth of smart edge computing.
The convergence of these trends has increased the demand for more flexible and adaptable embedded designs to keep pace with evolving technological requirements. To avoid a comprehensive, bottom-up redesign and deployment, system designers must be well-prepared to face a series of critical challenges, including increasing computational demands, expanding system functionalities, escalating security threats, and shorter time-to-market.
Accelerating Computational Demands
One of the challenges in enhancing system adaptability is the rapidly growing demand for edge computing, particularly for artificial intelligence. This trend is also evident in embedded computing devices and drives the need for heterogeneous computing, which has dedicated hardware accelerators for the most demanding computational tasks.
FPGAs are inherently flexible and are ideal for embedded design. They feature programmable logic cores that can be configured to implement nearly any logic function, and their programmable I/O supports many different standards and protocols. Even after systems are deployed in the field, system functionalities can continue to be updated over time, providing a smooth upgrade experience and supply chain flexibility, thus accelerating time to market.
Expanding System Functionality
By integrating AI and continuously optimizing, adaptive design techniques can make embedded systems more flexible and powerful.
In addition to expanding the smart functionalities of in-vehicle systems and smart doorbells, embedded vision applications such as autonomous mobile robots and industrial machine vision cameras, which require advanced computer vision algorithms, illustrate how using FPGA-based adaptive design approaches can achieve optimal energy efficiency and flexibility. As designers can modify accelerators and adapt their designs to the ever-changing AI requirements, FPGAs are their ideal choice.
Growing Security Threats
A fully interconnected world also has its downsides, as malicious actors can exploit this interconnectivity to cause harm. As embedded designs become increasingly complex, their attack surfaces and vectors also increase. This makes software and hardware protection more necessary than ever.
Hardware Root of Trust (HRoT) and Platform Firmware Recovery (PFR) are crucial for developing highly trustworthy devices. If FPGAs are used as HRoT, encryption algorithms can be continuously updated over time and can be used to monitor and protect the firmware of computing components in the system, achieving true PFR. Only when both software and hardware are adaptable can embedded designs respond to the growing security threats.
Rapid Time to Market
In addition to the challenges mentioned above, system designers also face immense pressure to quickly bring their solutions to market. In fact, being first to market will be crucial for success in the tech field.
Lattice focuses on providing a collection of solutions that help our customers achieve highly flexible embedded hardware and software designs faster and more efficiently. Our solution collection offers turnkey solutions for specific applications, combining reference platforms and designs, demonstrations, IP building blocks, FPGA design tools, and custom design services to help engineers build designs and go to market more quickly.
Today, Lattice’s solution collection includes Lattice sensAI™ for AI market applications, Lattice mVision™ for embedded vision, Lattice Automate™ for factory automation, Lattice Sentry™ for security applications, and Lattice ORAN™ suitable for 5G ORAN™ deployments. We have more products coming soon.
As the Internet of Things tightens the connections in the world and edge systems become smarter (in some cases fully automated), the inherent flexibility of FPGAs becomes increasingly important. As system engineers, adopting a flexible and adaptive engineering mindset will help ensure that systems and solutions can keep pace with the various challenges brought about by interconnectivity.
At Lattice, we focus on providing our customers with various ways to meet their ever-changing needs for applications in AI, security, embedded vision, control, and more through our small, low-power FPGA devices and technologies.