Semiconductor Engineering: Processing Moves To The Edge

Definitions vary by market and by vendor, but an explosion of data requires more processing to be done locally.

Edge computing has gained attention in two main areas. One is the industrial IoT, where it serves as a do-it-yourself infrastructure for on-site data centers. The second involves autonomous vehicles, where there is simply not enough time to ask the cloud for solutions.

“If there isn’t an immediate production target, you might get away with something that’s a lot less advanced,” said Ty Garibay, CTO at Arteris IP. “You might be able to aggregate this kind of functionality into multiple smaller chips made by different companies. There will be LiDAR, radar, and possibly a sensor fusion hub, which may be an FPGA. And then you might need enough compute power for the car controller, which also may have to figure out which data to process and what to send back to the cloud. The question now is how you make it smart enough to send back the right data.”

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