Digi-Key at embedded world 2023 with Imagination Technologies

Imagination Technologies is an IP company, best known for its graphic processors. Its vision is to be the undisputed leader in semiconductor IP solutions that transform billions of lives. It solves complex problems by creating innovative technologies that help its partners to succeed.

Robert Owen has been involved in university programmes for 29 years.

The main objective of the Imagination University Programme is to equip the next generation of engineers with the design and programming skills to solve tomorrow’s problems.

“If I’m successful at helping teachers, the students will get a better education, and ultimately Imagination will sell more,” explains Owen.

The past 12 months have been adventurous for Imagination, and when Electronic Specifier spoke to Owen last year it had just begun its RVfpga Workshop Series. These workshops are targeted at teachers, demonstrating how to give students real-world, hands-on expertise, in computer architecture and the RISC-V instruction set architecture.

RVfpga has been created to provide the foundation knowledge and hands-on experience that the next generation of programmers and engineers need.

Now, Imagination has trained over 400 teachers.

“We want RVfpga to become the standard choice for undergraduate education in computer architecture. We’ve got real momentum behind it now,” says Owen.

Imagination Technologies has launched its first edge AI course ‘Edge AI: Principles and Practices”. The course is based on both theoretical and practical elements with labs covering topics including edge detection, image and voice recognition.

“I’ve learnt first hand that AI is very important and pervading every aspect of electronics. Teaching young students about this is clearly very important. The difficulty is the field is changing so fast and the platforms and software is changing so fast that no sooner than you finish something, it’s out of date.

“We’ve been trying to settle on platforms, software and tools that we have a good level of confidence in that will still be fully supported and working over the next few years,” explains Owen.

The processor used in the course is an Imagination GPU and is linked to high-level AI languages such as Tensor Flow by Imagination’s “NC-SDK-AC” neural compute software development kit (academic edition). The hardware used for the course is BeagleBone AI-64 board launched by BeagleBoard.org in June 2022 and supplied through Digi-Key.

“We work quite closely with BeagleBoard.org because they produce and thoroughly support their platforms, and that’s really important,” says Owen.