Sondrel's SFA 100 IP platform for the Edge

By Chad Cox

Production Editor

Embedded Computing Design

July 15, 2021

News

Photo Courtesy of Sondrel

Sondrel's new SFA 100 IP reference platform makes creating high-performance battery powered IoT devices fast and easy.

The SFA 100 IP has an onboard Arm CPU to manage data gathered from its correlated sensors for transmissions via wire or wireless connection.

Also included is the Arm Ethos-U55 Machine Learning (ML) processor that provides a 480x uplift in ML performance. This combined processing capabilities enables the endpoint device to perform a variety of tasks including:

  • Voice activation
  • Image classification
  • Gesture recognition
  • Filtering
  • Inference
  • Tracking.

For security, the platform consists of an Arm Cortex-M55 with secure boot, cryptographic algorithm accelerators, and an Arm Corstone-300 subsystem with the standard secure/encrypted protocols.

The majority of the design work has already been created to produce this reference design so that all the customer needs is an IP and any minor customization needed for the final ASIC. This allows for the reduction of risks, design costs, and time to market.

Memory expansion 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 SFA 100 design enables it to operate on battery power for long periods using either Bluetooth BT5.1-LE or ZigBee.

For more information, visit sondrel.com

Chad Cox. Production Editor, Embedded Computing Design, has responsibilities that include handling the news cycle, newsletters, social media, and advertising. Chad graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a B.A. in Cultural and Analytical Literature.

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