Microchip Debuts Rev 2 of Its PolarFire FPGA Ethernet Sensor Bridge

Microchip has announced the availability of the new Microchip Rev 2.0 PolarFire Ethernet Sensor Bridge. The 4” × 5.7” (10 cm × 15 cm) board is designed to connect sensors, including high-speed cameras, to Nvidia Jetson, AGX Orin and IGX edge AI platforms.

AI continues its roll into smaller and more capable edge systems. The new bridge aims to help that transition along by improving edge-sensor integration while reducing cost and power consumption. The board allows developers to interface sensors with a flexible high-speed Ethernet architecture rather than via custom sensor hardware.

The Rev 2.0 PolarFire Ethernet Sensor Bridge enables developers to link sensors to a high-speed Ethernet architecture.

The bridge supports Nvidia Holoscan sensor bridge (HSB) sensor-over-Ethernet technology. HSB offers a low-latency to bridge between edge AI sensors and system processing engines. The new board has a Microchip PolarFire FPGA at its heart. HSB in combination with the bridge and camera interface daughter card allows streaming up to four 4K cameras at 60 fps.

Board Key Features

The Rev 2.0 PolarFire Ethernet Sensor Bridge consists of a main board holding the FPGA, two 10G SFP+ (Enhanced Small Form-Factor Pluggable) Ethernet modules and other I/O. An Nvidia Jetson adapter card plugs in to add four 22-pin MIPI CSI-2 camera connectors. The MIPI (mobile industry processor interface) CSI-2 (camera serial interface 2) is a widely adopted, Raspberry Pi-compatible, high-speed protocol for transmission of still and video images from embedded devices. The system ensures low-video latency by including on‑board optical latency measurement circuitry compatible with Nvidia’s latency display analysis tool.

Microchip Rev 2.0 PolarFire Ethernet Sensor Bridge

The PolarFireMPF200T-FCG784 comes with 192K logic elements, 588 18×18 math elements, 297 Kb fabric uPROM (non-volatile memory), and 13,300 Kb total RAM. The board contains an additional 2GB of 32-bit wide DDR4.

The sensor bridge adds I²C, UART and multiple GPIO and an industry standard PMOD connector. It supports multiple video interfaces, including; the SLVS-EC (Scalable Low-Voltage Signaling with Embedded Clock) high-speed serial interface, 12G‑SDI, HDMI and DisplayPort. Rev 2 is 60% smaller in physical size than Rev 1 and supports four cameras, up from two in the prior version. The board is usable with Nvidia development systems and deployable in production equipment.

Nvidia Edge Platforms: Jetson, AGX Orin and IGX Thor

Nvidia Jetson is a development platform targeted at cross-industry edge AI and robotics. It spans a broad ecosystem with developer kits, deployment modules, and a software stack. The Jetson specification allows for modular design flexibility with complex AI Nvidia processing over a wide variety of applications. On the low-end, it competes with Raspberry Pi level small computing systems. On the high-end, it competes with complex bespoke robotics and edge-AI designs.

PolarFire Ethernet Sensor Bridge and Nvidia platform block diagram

AGX Orin and IGX Thor are very similar at the silicon level. However, AGX Orin is designed for robotics, mobile systems and non-safety critical industrial edge-AI applications. IGX Thor (Industrial grade edge) is targeted at mission critical medical and industrial edge AI applications.

Both platforms offer secure real-time modular edge AI to speed development and deployment, but IGX includes additional safety, reliability and security features in hardware and software that make it suitable for safety-critical applications such as medical and regulated factory control.

A Shortcut to Powerful Edge AI Deployment

High-speed camera interfaces are complex enough to tax many designers. The Microchip sensor bridge modularizes the interface and utilizes a powerful FPGA to convert the video and other sensor data to Ethernet packets.

The software stack comes with several options. Microchip offers a free preprogrammed job file for the FPGA configuration that supports all base functionality. Purchasing the Microchip Libero design suite Gold license gets you the ability to customize the FPGA code. A Core10GMAC license is available which allows Core10GMAC development for 10GBASE-R and 10-Gigabit Media-Independent Interface (XGMII) integration.

All images used courtesy of Microchip.