How Efinix is Conquering the Hurdle of Hardware Acceleration for Devices at the Edge

In previous articles, we established the many ways FPGAs surpass other AI chipsets for running machine learning algorithms at the edge in terms of reconfigurability, power consumption, size, speed, and cost. Moreover, how the microarchitecture-agnostic RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) marries up with the architectural flexibility of the FPGA seamlessly. However, the apparent lack of mid-range, cost-effective FPGAs and their less-than-straightforward design flow are a major bottleneck — the software skills required for the fully custom hardware description language (HDL) implementation are difficult to find and often come with a steep learning curve.

Efinix fills the gap with FPGAs built on the innovative quantum compute fabric made up of reconfigurable tiles known as exchangeable logic and routing (XLR) cells that function as either logic or routing, rethinking the traditional fixed ratio of logic elements (LEs) and routing resources. This allows for a high-density fabric in a small device package where no part of the FPGA is underutilized. The potential of this platform transcends the typical barriers facing edge-based devices today: power consumption, latency, cost, size, and ease of development.

Possibly the most striking feature of Efinix FPGAs is the ecosystem and state-of-the-art tool flow surrounding it that lowers development barriers, allowing designers to readily implement AI at the edge using the same silicon — from prototype to production. Efinix has embraced the RISC-V, thereby allowing users to create applications and algorithms in software — capitalizing on the ease of programmability of this ISA without being bound to proprietary IP cores such as ARM. Since this is all done with flexible FPGA fabric, users can massively accelerate in hardware. Efinix offers support for both low level and more complex custom instruction acceleration. Some of these techniques include the TinyML accelerator and predefined hardware accelerator sockets. With approaches such as these, the leaps in acceleration accomplished delivers hardware performance while retaining a software-defined model that can be iterated and refined without the need to learn VHDL. This results in blazing-fast speeds for edge devices, all while consuming low power and functioning within a small footprint. This article discusses precisely how the Efinix platform simplifies the entire design and development cycle, allowing users to take advantage of the flexible FPGA fabric for a scalable embedded processing solution.

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