Jun 16 2021
O.C.E. Technology (www.ocetechnology.com), an Irish space technology company, has today presented and demonstrated its new artificial intelligence (AI) chip for embedded vision applications at the 2nd European Workshop on On-Board Data Processing.
This virtual event is hosted by the European Space Agency (ESA), Centre National d'études Spatiales (CNES) and German Aerospace Centre (DLR). The new AI chip called hisaor, from the Irish phrase for artificial intelligence (hintleachta saorga), incorporates eight GPUs and 8 neural network accelerators as an AI co-processing unit. Four ARM Cortex-A9 processors are the primary processing unit for the main operating system. hisaor also includes multiple on-chip camera interfaces and video encoding and decoding units along with multiple high-speed bus interfaces.
Barry Kavanagh, CEO, O.C.E. Technology, said, hisaor will enable new space applications to process high-resolution video and hyperspectral data on satellites minimising download data quantities and providing faster response to terrestrial data collected from onboard sensors."
Kavanagh added, "The hisaor development environment is based on VeriSilicon's Vivante Acuity™ software tools which make it easy for embedded developers to port their AI models trained in the cloud and execute these models on the chip. I see this as one of the main strengths of the product."
Hisaor was a joint development with Zhuhai Orbita Aerospace Science & Technology Co. Ltd. (300053.SZ) and is based on a collection of mature IP from leading companies. Work has also started on porting OCE's safety-approved real-time operating system OCEOS to the hisaor platform.
O.C.E. Technology is actively targeting the new technology at non-space applications such as autonomous vehicles, medical devices and intelligent manufacturing.
The company headquartered at NovaUCD, the Centre for New Ventures and Entrepreneurs at University College Dublin (UCD), develops software for technical applications and supplies radiation-hardened chip-level components targeted primarily at the space and high-reliability sectors.
O.C.E. is already operating in Europe, Korea, China, Russia and Singapore through a network of distributors.
O.C.E., an Enterprise Ireland supported company, also supplies a range of satellite subsystems including solar cells, batteries, and attitude control units. These subsystems are already well proven on the Chinese space programme.
Source: http://www.ocetechnology.com