New Industry Products

Development Kit for Low Power, Embedded AI Applications Consumes 75µW in Standby Mode

May 30, 2019 by Scott McMahan

Lattice Semiconductor Corporation released the HM01B0 UPduino Shield, a comprehensive development kit for AI in devices utilizing vision and sound sensory inputs. In the Arduino form factor, this rapid prototyping board includes components designers need for quick development of always-on, low power smart IoT devices.

"The Upduino Shield development kit offers substantial flexibility to product developers by making the addition of vision-based AI support to IoT-connected devices quick and easy"

This new development kit comes with the a Lattice iCE40 UltraPlus™ FPGA-based Upduino 2.0 board and includes a Himax HM01B0 image sensor module.

Uduino 2.0 Board

Edge Intelligent FPGA

iCE40 UltraPlus FPGA with 5K lookup tables (LUTs) can implement neural networks for pattern matching necessary to bring always-on intelligence to the edge.

Optimized for embedded AI and IoT applications, the iCE40 UltraPlus FPGA boasts one of world's smallest, lowest power distributed processing solutions. It has power consumption as low as 75µW in sleep mode and just 1mA to 10mA when active.

The iCE40 UltraPlus also supports I/O port configuration flexibility, including combining multiple signals for transmission over one port. This flexibility allows investigation and experimentation with various designs and to speed up product prototyping.

Multiple packages of the iCE40 UltraPlus are available to fit broad range of applications. From ultra-small 2.15mm x 2.50mm x 0.45mm WLCSP package optimized for consumer and IoT devices to 0.5mm pitch 7mm x 7mm QFN for cost optimized applications.

iCE40 UltraPlus Features

  • Flexible logic architecture with 2800 or 5280 4-input LUTs, customizable I/Os, up to 80Kbits of embedded memory and 1Mbit of embedded memory
  • Ultra-low power advanced process with sleep current as low as 75µA and 1mA to 10mA active current for most applications
  • High performance signal processing using DSP blocks with multiply and accumulate functions
  • Soft Neural Network IPs and compiler for flexible Machine Learning/AI implementation
  • FPGA design tools, demos and reference designs to kick start designs

Also included in the modular hardware platform are proof-of-concept demos such as human presence detection and hand gesture detection.

"The Upduino Shield development kit offers substantial flexibility to product developers by making the addition of vision-based AI support to IoT-connected devices quick and easy," said Peiju Chiang, Product Marketing Manager at Lattice Semiconductor. "And because the kit uses our low-power iCE UltraPlus FPGA, adding AI support to IoT products is possible without significant increase in product power consumption, a key requirement for IoT devices operating at the network Edge."

Features of Upduino Shield development kit

  • UPduino 2.0
  • Lattice UltraPlus FPGA with 5.3K LUTs, 1 Mb SPRAM, 120 Kb DPRAM, 8 Multipliers
  • FTDI FT232H USB to SPI Device for FPGA programming
  • 12Mhz Crystal Oscillator Clock Source
  • 34 GPIOs on 0.1in headers for connecting to the adapter board
  • SPI Flash, RGB LED, 3.3V and 1.2V voltage regulators
  • Can be used with the new Lattice Radiant® Design Software 1.1

Himax HM01B0 Module

  • Production module for HM01B0 low power image sensor with board to board connector
  • Supports 30 fps at 1.1mW

Himax HM01B0 Adapter Board

  • Mating adapter board connects to the UPduino 2.0 and HM01B0 Module board
  • 2 I2S microphones
  • Debug LEDs

Lattice Semiconductor priced the HM01B0 UPduino Shield development kit under $50 USD to enable broad adoption.