OKdo strikes partnership with Google's Coral

Coral offers a comprehensive platform for the development of devices that can leverage local artificial intelligence (AI) using power-efficient edged-based tensor processing units (edge TPUs).

This means that constant energy-sapping Internet connectivity is not required, plus there are no latency or network security issues.

Comprising hardware components, software tools and related content, the Coral product portfolio now available via OKdo is fully compatible with Raspberry Pi. These products allow emerging application opportunities to be addressed in healthcare, environment monitoring, smart agriculture, industrial automation and vision systems.

Among the key highlights are:

• The Coral Dev Board. This compact form factor SBC (pictured) is optimised for carrying out high-speed AI inferences in space-limited application environments. Utilising Coral’s Edge TPU coprocessor, it is capable of an impressive 4TOPS operation
• The Coral System-on-Module (SoM). A fully integrated system solution, this features NXP's iMX 8M system-on-chip (SoC), which has Arm Cortex processing, along with eMMC and LPDDR4 RAM memory resources, plus Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. By employing this SoM, prototypes created on the Coral Dev Board can be made ready for full-scale production.
• The Coral USB Accelerator. This supports 2TOPS/W operation for fast AI inferencing with minimal power budget. This hardware is straightforward to work with, by simply connecting it to a USB port.
• The Coral Camera. This 5Mpixel imaging module comes with built-in autofocus and auto exposure control functionality.
• The Coral Environmental Sensor Board. An add-on board which enables the inclusion of various sensing functions. These include light level, barometric pressure, temperature and humidity.
• The Coral Mini PCIe Accelerator. Through this small format PCIe module, it is possible for the benefits of Coral Edge TPU processing to be brought to existing systems.

“Coral is becoming increasingly prevalent across industries as more companies discover the benefits of edge AI, which brings stronger privacy and better performance at low cost and low power to a diverse set of use cases,” explained Billy Rutledge, Director of Coral at Google. “By engaging with OKdo, we are well positioned to serve prospective customers all over the world, from hobbyists to big corporations.”

“Through Google’sCoral technology, the implementation of on-device AI is made much simpler. The local inferencing capabilities derived from it will mean deployments are no longer dependent on a continued Internet connection, thereby eliminating the associated power consumption, latency and data privacy drawbacks,” added Richard Curtin, OKdo’s SVP Technology. “Furthermore, the platform greatly facilitates the scaling up of engineers’ initial concepts, rapidly moving from the prototyping stage towards volume production.”

OKdo is a global technology company in the Electrocomponents Group.