In the shadow of the recent Embedded Vision Alliance summit, Synopsys tossed its hat into the vision ring with their new Embedded Vision Development System. While it doesn’t appear to break any new ground in terms of tools or things that didn’t exist before, it does assemble into one place a variety of components that an aspiring embedded vision architect/designer might need.

One of the underlying assumptions is that, in order to meet the performance and cost requirements of embedded vision, which holds promise for much consumer gadgetry, an application-specific instruction-set processor (ASIP) is needed. In other words, you need to tailor a processor to this application and ensure that the instruction set is customized to handle frequent vision-related operations efficiently. The technology Synopsys acquired through CoWare figures into this part of the solution.

The other assumption is that you’re going to need to prototype this stuff in FPGAs to optimize the architecture before committing to silicon.

So their kit includes:

–          A ported OpenCV library

–          A C/C++ compiler and runtime environment

–          A basic RISC processor that can be modified using their Processor Designer tool

–          A HAPS prototyping system

You can find more info in their announcement.