General Purpose Processing Elements Research Articles

The Hardware/Software Divide for High-performance Embedded Controllers

The paper provides a primarily qualitative overview of the hardware/software issues that relate to achieving efficient solutions for real-time embedded control. This issue has always existed, even with general-purpose processing elements, but it is likely to become much more critical for new families of programmable devices. The purpose of the paper is to identify trends relating to controllers that employ these devices.

General-purpose vision chip architecture for real-time machine vision

To solve the I/O bottleneck problem in existing vision systems and to realize versatile processing adaptive to various and changing environments, we propose a new vision chip architecture for applications such as robot vision. The chip has general-purpose processing elements (PEs) with each PE being directly connected to a photo detector (PD) and can implement various visual processing algorithms. We developed and simulated some sample programs for the chip and proved that they can be processed within 1 ms/frame, a rate that is high enough for high-speed visual feedback for robot control. Aiming to complete the chip, we are now developing test chips based on the architecture. The latest design has 8 x 8 PEs and PDs in an area 3.3 mm x 3.0 mm using a 0.8 μm CMOS process.