Designed to be the solution for an AI computing device right at the Edge, Sondrel’s new SFA 100 IP reference platform makes creating high-performance, battery-powered IoT devices easy and fast. The design has an onboard Arm CPU to locally process data gathered from its associated sensors for onward transmission via wired or wireless connection for further analysis. Naturally, security is built-in using standard secure/encrypted protocols.

The SFA 100 provides the ability to integrate a machine-learning engine onto a low-cost, low power edge device and is based on the Arm Corstone-300 subsystem that ensures a very high level of security. It consists of an Arm Cortex-M55 with the secure boot with cryptographic algorithm accelerators and supports TrustZone and CryptoCell for additional security for the onward processed data. Also included is the Arm Ethos-U55 Machine Learning (ML) processor that provides a 480x uplift in ML performance. This powerful, combined processing capability enables the endpoint device to perform a variety of ‘smarts’ such as voice activation, image classification, gesture recognition, filtering, inference, and tracking depending on the application. If these need more memory, they can easily be scaled up via the DRAM interface.

The design has GPIO, I2C, UART, and QSPI peripheral interfaces to capture sensor data, such as video, image, sound, and both static and dynamic data, along with a 12-bit audio DAC for voice commands. The low overall power requirement of the SFA 100 design enables it to operate on battery power for long periods which is complemented by low power, wireless connectivity using either Bluetooth BT5.1-LE or ZigBee.

To further reduce risk and time to market, Sondrel offers a full turnkey service that turns designs into fully tested, shipping silicon.