Date: 28/10/2020

NXP invests in Au-Zone to expand its machine Learning offerings

NXP Semiconductors has invested as a strategic partner in Canada-based Au-Zone Technologies to expand NXP’s eIQ Machine Learning software, tools and inference engines for Edge ML. Au-Zone’s DeepView ML Tool Suite to enlarge NXP's eIQ with an intuitive, graphical user interface (GUI) and workflow, broad spectrum of developers to import datasets and models, quickly train, and deploy NN models and ML workloads across the NXP Edge processing semiconductor chips.
NXP is also working closely with Arm in developing Arm Ethos-U microNPU (Neural Processing Unit) architecture so that it will integrate the Ethos-U65 microNPU into its next generation of i.MX applications processor chips for the Industrial and IoT Edge market.
“NXP’s scalable applications processors deliver an efficient product platform and a broad ecosystem for our customers to quickly deliver innovative systems,” said Ron Martino, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Edge Processing at NXP Semiconductors. “Through these partnerships with both Arm and Au-Zone, in addition to technology developments within NXP, our goal is to continuously increase the efficiency of our processors while simultaneously increasing our customers’ productivity and reducing their time to market. NXP’s vision is to help our customers achieve lower cost of ownership, maintain high levels of security with critical data, and to stay safe with enhanced forms of human-machine-interaction.”
NXP said by adding Au-Zone’s DeepView run-time inference engine to complement open source inference technologies in NXP eIQ, users will be able to quickly deploy and evaluate ML workloads and performance across NXP devices with minimal effort. A key feature of this run-time inference engine is that it optimizes the system memory usage and data movement uniquely for each SoC architecture, as per NXP.
“Au-Zone is incredibly excited to announce this investment and strategic partnership with NXP, especially with its exciting roadmap for additional ML accelerated devices,” said Brad Scott, CEO of Au-Zone. “We created DeepViewTM to provide developers with intuitive tools and inferencing technology, so this partnership represents a great union of world class silicon, run-time inference engine technology, and a development environment that will further accelerate the deployment of embedded ML features. This partnership builds on a decade of engineering collaboration with NXP and will serve as a catalyst to deliver more advanced Machine Learning technologies and turnkey solutions as OEM’s continue to transition inferencing to the Edge.”
“There has been a surge of AI and ML across industrial and IoT applications driving demand for more on-device ML capabilities,” said Dennis Laudick, Vice President of Marketing, Machine Learning Group, at Arm. “The Ethos-U65 will power a new wave of edge AI, providing NXP customers with secure, reliable, and smart on-device intelligence.”