Embracing Change in Embedded Design

At this year's Embedded World, Steve Douglass, senior vice president of R&D at Lattice, gave a keynote address on the importance of flexibility and adaptability at both the software and hardware levels in embedded system design to help keep up with important technology trends today and in the future. This article briefly reviews the address.

Our industry is facing profound technological changes that are fundamentally reshaping our world. The global spread of 5G has laid the foundation for the explosion of more low-power, low-latency connected devices, and almost all devices and systems are connected to the Internet. Not only are we connecting billions of devices to the Internet, but they are also equipped with more sensors - cameras, microphones, radars, lidars, accelerometers, and the addition of these sensors makes devices more capable of perceiving the world around them. The development of computer vision and network edge computing has further enhanced the capabilities of these devices, turning them into an indispensable part of the environment around us. These devices will generate a large amount of AI data, leading to an explosive growth of intelligence at the edge of the network.

The convergence of these trends is increasing the need for more flexible and adaptable embedded designs to keep pace with evolving technology requirements. To avoid a complete, bottom-up redesign and deployment, system designers must be prepared to face a number of key challenges, including increasing computing requirements, expanding system functionality, escalating security threats, and shorter time to market.

Accelerating computing requirements

One of the challenges in enhancing system adaptability is the rapidly growing demand for computing at the network edge, especially the rapid development of artificial intelligence. This trend is also true in embedded computing devices and is driving the need for heterogeneous computing, which has dedicated hardware accelerators for the most demanding computing tasks.

FPGAs are inherently very flexible and are ideal for embedded design. They have programmable logic cores that can be configured to implement almost any logic function, and their programmable I/Os also support many different standards and protocols. Even after the system is deployed in the field, the system functionality can continue to be updated over time, providing a smooth upgrade experience and supply chain flexibility, and accelerating product launch.

Expand system functionality

By integrating AI and continuously optimizing it, adaptable design techniques can make embedded systems more flexible and powerful.

In addition to expanding the intelligent functions of in-vehicle systems and smart doorbells, embedded vision applications such as autonomous mobile robots and industrial machine vision cameras that require advanced computer vision algorithms are also good examples of using an FPGA-based adaptive design approach to achieve optimal energy efficiency and flexibility. FPGAs are ideal for designers because they can modify accelerators and adapt their designs to changing AI requirements in the future.

Growing security threats

The downside to a fully connected world is that malicious actors can exploit that interconnectivity to wreak havoc. As embedded designs become more complex, their attack surfaces and attack vectors increase. This makes software and hardware protection more necessary than ever.

Hardware Root of Trust (HRoT) and Platform Firmware Resilience (PFR) are key to developing highly trusted devices. If the FPGA is used as the HRoT, the cryptographic algorithms can be continuously updated over time and can also be used to monitor and protect the firmware of the computing components in the system, achieving true PFR. Only when both software and hardware are adaptable can embedded designs cope with the growing security threats.

Fast time to market

In addition to the challenges mentioned above, system designers are under tremendous pressure to bring their solutions to market quickly. In fact, in the technology world, being first to market can mean the difference between success and failure.

Lattice is focused on providing a solution set that helps our customers implement highly flexible embedded hardware and software designs faster and more efficiently. Our solution set provides turnkey solutions for specific applications that combine reference platforms and designs, demos, IP building blocks, FPGA design tools and custom design services to help engineers build designs and get to market faster.

Today, the Lattice solution portfolio includes Lattice sensAI™ for AI market applications, Lattice mVision™ for embedded vision, Lattice Automate™ for factory automation, Lattice Sentry™ for security, and Lattice ORAN™ for 5G ORAN™ deployments, with more to come.

As the Internet of Everything makes the world more connected and network edge systems become more intelligent (and in some cases completely autonomous), the inherent flexibility of FPGAs becomes increasingly important. As a system engineer, adopting an adaptive engineering mindset will help ensure that systems and solutions can keep up with the challenges brought by the interconnect.

At Lattice, we are focused on providing our customers with ways to meet their evolving needs for applications such as AI, security, embedded vision, controls, and more with our small, low-power FPGA devices and technologies.

Contact us today to learn how you can get ahead with Lattice FPGAs and solutions!