Texas Instruments (TI) today announced a new processor that enables affordable and simple processing of vision and AI processing for up to 12 cameras in building, industrial and retail automation applications, making it easier to develop and scale AI designs in home and industrial settings.

TI Korea (CEO Joong-seo Park) held a media briefing at its TI Korea office on the 21st and announced six new Arm® Cortex®-based vision processor product lines to further accelerate innovation in edge intelligence.

A new family of products helps design engineers add vision and artificial intelligence processing to doorway cameras, machine vision, and autonomous mobile robots at lower cost and with greater energy efficiency.

The new family, which includes the AM62A, AM68A, and AM69A processors, is supported by open source evaluation and model development tools and common software programmable through industry-standard application programming interfaces (APIs), frameworks, and models.

This vision processor, software, and tools platform helps design engineers easily develop and scale edge AI designs across multiple systems while accelerating time to market.br />
TI’s new vision processor helps bring intelligence from the cloud to the real world by removing the cost and design complexity of implementing vision processing and deep learning capabilities in low-power edge AI applications.

These processors feature a system-on-chip (SoC) architecture with extensive integration. Integrated components include an Arm Cortex-A53 or Cortex-A72 central processing unit, a third-generation TI image signal processor, embedded memory, interfaces, and hardware accelerators that provide from 1 to 32 terabytes of computational power (TOPS) of AI processing for deep learning algorithms.

Looking at the key products, the AM62A3, AM62A3-Q1, AM62A7, and AM62A7-Q1 support 1 to 2 cameras with less than 2W of power in applications such as entrance cameras and smart retail systems. They include the AM62A3, the industry’s most cost-effective 1-TOPs vision processor, and are priced starting at $12 per 1,000-unit quantity.

The AM68A supports from one to eight cameras in applications such as machine vision and enables up to 8 TOPS of AI processing for advanced video analytics systems.

The AM69A enables 32 TOPS of AI processing for 1 to 12 cameras in high-performance applications such as edge AI boxes, autonomous mobile robots, and traffic monitoring systems.

Design engineers can accelerate time to market for edge AI applications with Edge AI Studio, a free, open-source tool from TI that will be available in beta starting in the second quarter of 2023. Edge AI Studio is a web-based tool with a variety of features that enable users to quickly and easily develop and test models based on their own models and TI’s optimized models. TI's models can also be retrained using user-based data.

The AM68A processor is available now through TI and authorized distributors, and production samples of the AM62A and AM69A are available from TI.

Pricing for AM6xA processors starts at $12 in 1,000-unit quantities. Starter kits for the AM62A ($249), AM68A ($249), and AM69A ($299) are available on TI.com.