Aldebaran and MENSA CPU cores face application expansion challenge

Aldebaran CPU core has been developed by Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) on its own. Aldebaran CPU core’s micro-architecture and RTL can be acquired by companies through agreement with ETRI and further development of additional functionalities required by companies is possible. Aldebaran CPU core provides high performance and low-power structure and Aldebaran S2 SoC utilizing it achieves maximum operating speed of 800 MHz and energy efficiency of 0.24mW/MHz, which is industry’s highest power efficiency, according to ETRI.

Having both high-level technology and cost competitiveness, Aldebaran CPU core can contribute to such fields as IoT, robotics and automotive and replace embedded CPU cores which have been entirely imported until now.

Researcher Young-Soo Kwon of processor research laboratory, ETRI, said that “Aldebaran can be utilized as an automotive safety processor by applying image recognition function and ISO26262 to it. While automotive semiconductor segment is mostly taken up by foreign companies, Korea’s domestic companies are focusing on relevant image recognition technologies. So it is our goal to adapt Aldebaran processors to the field.” In particular, the future of automotive image recognition section is very promising as it is getting much attention as a core function of autonomous vehicles. 

 
▲Demonstration of Aldebaran processor, which is being applied to automotive image recognition field.

1-GHz Aldebaran processor complying with ISO26262 was released in April. “Based on this commercialization, just as such global companies as Renesas or Infineon are doing, we will target image recognition section of high-performance ADAS market with our Aldebaran processor and apply ISO26262 to our high-performance processor,” Kwon emphasized.

KETI to expand its MENSA applications to intelligent vehicles, IoT devices, UAVs and others
To meet the demand for hardware-based MCU capable of efficient calculation of intelligent algorithm, Korea Electronic Technology Institute (KETI) has developed MENSA (Microcontroller with Enhanced Numeric, Scheduling and Artificial intelligence unit) core.

Currently GAU sensor signal processing SoC which utilizes MENSA core is available and development of voice recognition SoC is also in progress utilizing MENSA core.

 
▲Low-power sensor system implemented by KETI using its MENSA core

Dong-Soon Kim, Senior Researcher of KETI, disclosed that “in the future, we plan to establish ECLIPSE-based development environment for MENSA and, on the basis of this, to expand its applications to mobile, intelligent vehicles, IoT devices, UAVs, robotics, etc.”