MIPS, INOVA Bring Physical AI to Robotic Hands with New Reference Platform

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MIPS, a GlobalFoundries company, announced a collaboration with Inova Semiconductors GmbH, to deliver a robotics control reference platform for advanced humanoids and physical AI edge platforms. Building on the strengths of Inova’s Automotive expertise in zonal architectures, the platform will enable mixed-criticality compute featuring real-time control loops and secure AI workloads, manufactured on GlobalFoundries (GF) FDX platform to deliver high quality, leading performance, and ultra-low power operation.

“Together with INOVA, we’re delivering a Physical AI reference platform that simplifies robot design, reduces BOM cost, and gives builders an open, standards-based path to create whole product families with low latency and functionally safe connectivity,” said Sameer Wasson, MIPS CEO. “Robotics is moving rapidly and the leaders will scale quickly and cost-effectively. By pairing INOVA’s high-speed communication links with MIPS’ open RISC-V compute and mixed signal technologies, this scalable reference platform turns ‘sense-think-act-communicate’ into a Physical AI building block that lowers risk, lowers cost, and accelerates time to market.”

The advanced robotic arm reference platform combines the expertise of INOVA, MIPS, and GlobalFoundries to build an advanced Physical AI building block that aggregates data interfaces and enables multiple network topologies, driving fast development cycles for real-time high-performance multi-axis motion control. These features are enabled through INOVA’s innovative APXpress high-speed interface and MIPS Atlas M8500 RISC-V high-performance microcontroller processor IP, MIPS Atlas S8200 RISC-V AI processor IP, and MIPS Atlas mixed signal technologies combined with GF’s FDX® process technology to deliver ultra-low power. The platform is a custom SoC for robotics workloads and other Physical AI applications that require mission critical capabilities, on-device secure AI, security, and highly efficient performance.

“Advanced humanoids demand secure, deterministic connectivity and a scalable control backbone. INOVA together with GF & MIPS, we’re giving robot makers a zonal, RISC-V-based blueprint that cuts complexity and cost to help scale humanoids and advanced robotics from prototype to production faster,” said Robert Isele, CEO at INOVA. “The creation of a reference zonal architecture for advanced robotics will enable simpler and faster creation of humanoid and other robotic form factors.”

Early access to the platform is facilitated by MIPS Atlas Explorer, a simulation-based hardware/software co-design platform. This grants software developers access to virtual representations of the compute elements to start optimization of vision language action models preparing the foundational model for the robotics control reference architecture.