As 2021 rolls on, edge AI is becoming the focus of so many new products and technology evolutions, it’s threatening to make cloud-based AI seem like a quaint notion. The latest firm targeting edge AI with new semiconductor solutions is Ambarella, which announced today that it added two new system-on-a-chip products to its AI vision SoC portfolio.
The company, which started in 2004 as a developer of chips for solid state camcorders and broadcast headend equipment, has spent the last several years perfecting computer vision chips for sectors like security and automotive, and building out its its CVflow architecture, a low-power computer vision engine that connects to its SoCs to enable AI processing.
Ambarella’s newest SoCs are the CV5S, which is designed for multiple-sensor devices providing 360-degree and long-range views, and the CV52S for single-sensor security cameras that require higher-resolution video and higher AI performance to recognize license plate numbers and faces at long distances. The CV5S can process four different image channels from a multi-image camera at 4K resolution and 30 frames per second, while also performing AI processing on each image. The CV52S supports 4K resolution at 60 frames per second.
Jerome Gigot, senior director of marketing at Ambarella, told Fierce Electronics, “The cost of sensors is coming down, so you are seeing a lot more of them out there, and the two things our customers are asking most about are can they move more of their AI processing from servers to be on the camera device itself, and also can they get better accuracy for recognizing and processing what’s in that image.”
Ambarella’s SoCs could lay the groundwork for a wide variety of applications in areas ranging from smart cities and smart retail to autonomous vehicles and robotics, essentially any applications requiring accurate image identification and AI processing, according to Chris Day, vice president of marketing and business development at Ambarella. Day added that Ambarella gains traction in these use cases by selling into the camera makers.
That market is a big one and growing, according to research firm Yole Développement, whose report, “Cameras and Computing for Surveillance and Security,” put the total market value at $38 billon by 2025. About $4.1 billion of that total will come through the compute hardware segment, where Yole described Ambarella as one of the market leaders, along with China’s HiSilicon. Furthermore, two-thirds of that $4.1 billion will come from vision processors with embedded AI capabilities like the CV5S and CV52S.
“Vision processors with AI capabilities are the future: Yole forecasts a US$ 2.7 billion revenue in 2025, representing more than half of total revenue from hardware for surveillance,” a statement from Yole’s report description read.
Day said the company believes its new SoC families will open doors to new market opportunities. “About 60% to 65% of our revenue comes from security,” he said. About 20% comes from automotive, and we believe these new solutions will help us expand from there.”
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