Tag Archives: Edge TPU Accelerator

New Coral products for 2020

Posted by Billy Rutledge, Director Google Research, Coral Team

More and more industries are beginning to recognize the value of local AI, where the speed of local inference allows considerable savings on bandwidth and cloud compute costs, and keeping data local preserves user privacy.

Last year, we launched Coral, our platform of hardware components and software tools that make it easy to prototype and scale local AI products. Our product portfolio includes the Coral Dev Board, USB Accelerator, and PCIe Accelerators, all now available in 36 countries.

Since our release, we’ve been excited by the diverse range of applications already built on Coral across a broad set of industries that range from healthcare to agriculture to smart cities. And for 2020, we’re excited to announce new additions to the Coral platform that will expand the possibilities even further.

First up is the Coral Accelerator Module, an easy to integrate multi-chip package that encapsulates the Edge TPU ASIC. The module exposes both PCIe and USB interfaces and can easily integrate into custom PCB designs. We’ve been working closely with Murata to produce the module and you can see a demo at CES 2020 by visiting their booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Tech East, Central Plaza, CP-18. The Coral Accelerator Module will be available in the first half of 2020.

Coral Accelerator Module, a new multi-chip module with Google Edge TPU

Coral Accelerator Module, a new multi-chip module with Google Edge TPU

Next, we’re announcing the Coral Dev Board Mini, which provides a smaller form-factor, lower-power, and lower-cost alternative to the Coral Dev Board. The Mini combines the new Coral Accelerator Module with the MediaTek 8167s SoC to create a board that excels at 720P video encoding/decoding and computer vision use cases. The board will be on display during CES 2020 at the MediaTek showcase located in the Venetian, Tech West, Level 3. The Coral Dev Board Mini will be available in the first half of 2020.

We're also offering new variations to the Coral System-on-Module, now available with 2GB and 4GB LPDDR4 RAM in addition to the original 1GB LPDDR4 configuration. We’ll be showcasing how the SoM can be used in smart city, manufacturing, and healthcare applications, as well as a few new SoC and MCU explorations we’ve been working on with the NXP team at CES 2020 in their pavilion located at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Tech East, Central Plaza, CP-18.

Finally, Asus has chosen the Coral SOM as the base to their Tinker Edge T product, a maker friendly single-board computer that features a rich set of I/O interfaces, multiple camera connectors, programmable LEDs, and color-coded GPIO header. The Tinker Edge T board will be available soon -- more details can be found here from Asus.

Come visit Coral at CES Jan 7-10 in Las Vegas:

  • NXP exhibit (LVCC, Tech East, Central Plaza, CP-18)
  • Mediatek exhibit (Venetian, Tech West, Level 3)
  • Murata exhibit (LVCC, South Hall 2, MP26061)

And, as always, we are always looking for ways to improve the platform, so keep reaching out to us at [email protected].

Coral updates: Project tutorials, a downloadable compiler, and a new distributor

Posted by Vikram Tank (Product Manager), Coral Team

coral hardware

We’re committed to evolving Coral to make it even easier to build systems with on-device AI. Our team is constantly working on new product features, and content that helps ML practitioners, engineers, and prototypers create the next generation of hardware.

To improve our toolchain, we're making the Edge TPU Compiler available to users as a downloadable binary. The binary works on Debian-based Linux systems, allowing for better integration into custom workflows. Instructions on downloading and using the binary are on the Coral site.

We’re also adding a new section to the Coral site that showcases example projects you can build with your Coral board. For instance, Teachable Machine is a project that guides you through building a machine that can quickly learn to recognize new objects by re-training a vision classification model directly on your device. Minigo shows you how to create an implementation of AlphaGo Zero and run it on the Coral Dev Board or USB Accelerator.

Our distributor network is growing as well: Arrow will soon sell Coral products.

New AIY Edge TPU Boards

Posted by Billy Rutledge, Director of AIY Projects

Over the past year and a half, we've seen more than 200K people build, modify, and create with our Voice Kit and Vision Kit products. Today at Cloud Next we announced two new devices to help professional engineers build new products with on-device machine learning(ML) at their core: the AIY Edge TPU Dev Board and the AIY Edge TPU Accelerator. Both are powered by Google's Edge TPU and represent our first steps towards expanding AIY into a platform for experimentation with on-device ML.

The Edge TPU is Google's purpose-built ASIC chip designed to run TensorFlow Lite ML models on your device. We've learned that performance-per-watt and performance-per-dollar are critical benchmarks when processing neural networks within a small footprint. The Edge TPU delivers both in a package that's smaller than the head of a penny. It can accelerate ML inferencing on device, or can pair with Google Cloud to create a full cloud-to-edge ML stack. In either configuration, by processing data directly on-device, a local ML accelerator increases privacy, removes the need for persistent connections, reduces latency, and allows for high performance using less power.

The AIY Edge TPU Dev Board is an all-in-one development board that allows you to prototype embedded systems that demand fast ML inferencing. The baseboard provides all the peripheral connections you need to effectively prototype your device — including a 40-pin GPIO header to integrate with various electrical components. The board also features a removable System-on-module (SOM) daughter board can be directly integrated into your own hardware once you're ready to scale.

The AIY Edge TPU Accelerator is a neural network coprocessor for your existing system. This small USB-C stick can connect to any Linux-based system to perform accelerated ML inferencing. The casing includes mounting holes for attachment to host boards such as a Raspberry Pi Zero or your custom device.

On-device ML is still in its early days, and we're excited to see how these two products can be applied to solve real world problems — such as increasing manufacturing equipment reliability, detecting quality control issues in products, tracking retail foot-traffic, building adaptive automotive sensing systems, and more applications that haven't been imagined yet.

Both devices will be available online this fall in the US with other countries to follow shortly.

For more product information visit g.co/aiy and sign up to be notified as products become available.