China-owned Dream Chip tapes out 10TOPS SoC

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Dream Chip Technologies GmbH (Hannover, Germany) has taped out an automotive SoC that includes an artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator.

www.eenewsembedded.com/, Aug. 22, 2023 – 

Dream Chip was acquired by Goodix, a Chinese automotive and industrial microcontroller supplier, in 2020 (see China's Goodix completes acquisition of Dream Chip).

The SoC contains two AI accelerators with 10 TOPS aggregated performance integrated with two Dream Chip Image Signal Processors (ISPs), an ARM Cortex-R52 based functional safety processor (Alcatraz), a dual-core ARM Cortex-A65 processor cluster, and an Arteris FlexNoC Network-on-Chip.

The two AI accelerators are a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) from the TU Dresden and a NPU from Cadence (NNA110).

The NPU from the TU Dresden is a circuit that consists of a RISC processor with a local program memory, 768 Processing Elements (PE) with closely coupled memory, and a local DMA controller. The NNA110 is a Deep Neural Network Accelerator which is optimized for artificial intelligence (AI) empowered vision, audio, radar/lidar, and fused sensor applications, delivering industry leading performance and power efficiency by taking advantage of sparsity in weights and activations. Together the two AI cores achieve a total of 10 TOPS with INT8 precision.

Dream Chip's two low-latency 5k line size image signal processors support CMOS sensors up to 19.6 MPixel and perform image processing tasks without impacting the Cortex-A65AE or Cortex-R52 performance. The ISP was developed by Dream Chip according to the ISO26262:2018 standard and is certified up to ASIL-B/-D by TÜV Süd. A 24-bit hard-wired image pipeline with low energy consumption is used. The ISP requires no additional frame buffer which leads to a latency of 200 microseconds.

Alcatraz is Dream Chip's patented safety island subsystem for automotive applications, based on the ARM Cortex-R52 dual-core lock-step processor. The safety island subsystem will be used inside automotive SoCs to supervise application processors and to detect and handle safety violations.

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