Cadence Strengthens Tensilica Vision AI Software Partner Ecosystem

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Cadence Design Systems, Inc. announced that it has welcomed Kudan and Visionary.ai to the Tensilica software partner ecosystem, bringing industry-leading simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and AI image signal processor (ISP) solutions to Cadence® Tensilica® Vision DSPs and AI platforms. The broad Tensilica Vision and AI software ecosystem includes more than 50 partners developing solutions for these platforms, covering automotive, smartphone apps, IoT, software services, and many other segments. 

“To best address our customers’ design challenges, it’s important to approach solutions holistically. From a hardware standpoint, ongoing innovations in Tensilica IP and architecture are critical for continued momentum with leading smartphone manufacturers and providers of IoT systems and next-generation connected vehicles,” said Amol Borkar, director of product management, marketing and business development for Tensilica Vision and AI DSPs at Cadence. “A robust software ecosystem is also essential, and partnering with industry leaders like Kudan and Visionary.ai helps us bring cutting-edge SLAM and AI ISP solutions to run efficiently on Tensilica IP-based devices with the best power-performance envelope yet.”

Kudan is an industry leader in visual odometry and an early implementer of SLAM algorithms. SLAM is a technique used by many camera or sensor-based systems to identify one’s position and orientation in an environment with high precision. While fairly complex, SLAM is implemented in many household products, including robot vacuum cleaners and AR/VR devices, and in more complex systems, such as self-driving vehicles and self-navigating drones. Kudan’s proprietary SLAM implementation on the Tensilica Vision Q7 DSP yielded a 10X performance improvement for the front-end feature extraction stages, translating to a nearly 15% speedup of the overall SLAM pipeline compared to CPU-based implementations.

“We’re very excited about our partnership with Cadence and the opportunity to work with the Tensilica platform to accelerate Kudan’s SLAM pipeline,” said Juan Wee, CEO at Kudan USA. “Cadence’s Tensilica Vision DSPs provide specialized instructions that optimize various stages of the SLAM algorithm, delivering significant gains with power savings to the end customer. We look forward to improving the accessibility and adoption of our SLAM solution together.”

In most systems with image or video functionality, the set of ISP functions is well established and typically provided as a hardware block, resulting in high-performance throughput but no flexibility or adaptability to current conditions. Visionary.ai’s novel approach uses AI to replace traditional “hardwired” ISP functions, enabling high-quality videos to be produced in real-time, even in the most challenging lighting conditions. Visionary.ai’s efficient AI-ISP enables customers to implement a camera pipeline with resolutions greater than full HD while operating at over 30fps on the Tensilica NNA110 accelerator.

“At Visionary.ai, we have developed a method of using AI to dramatically improve image quality in real time, particularly in the most challenging lighting conditions,” said Oren Debbi, CEO of Visionary.ai. “For this technology to reach its true potential, there is a need for fast and efficient neural network computations. Joining Cadence’s Tensilica ecosystem will help ensure that our customers have a very competitive solution that runs on some of the most efficient vision and AI platforms out of the box.”