5G is bringing AIoT onto the fast lane and turning it into the core driver to the Internet of Everything. However, AIoT is more than a “Lego-like” combination of AI and IoT; rather, it is more about the in-depth fusion of AI with IoT connectivity technologies under the context of application scenarios and customization. Now AIoT faces three challenges:
1. Fragmentation: The Internet of Everything has created a variety of application scenarios and products; nevertheless, as a typical long tail market, AIoT is facing highly fragmented requirements, due to the restricted volume in each single market segment – diversified but small in size. In turn, those diversified requirements have resulted in fragmented technologies, including a highly distributed series of connectivity technologies, safety technologies, chips, solutions and operating systems.
2. Performance: With an increasing number of products and applications implemented, consumers now demand better user experience, which requires stronger capacities from AIoT platforms. In addition to higher AI computing power, intelligent endpoints have to be capable of handling different scenarios and edge computing.
3. Security: The combination of AI and IoT is adding extra complexity to security requirements. From chips and sensors, to hardware interfaces and software platforms, system level security challenges are everywhere. AIoT endpoints are not only challenged by the cloud-/channel/device-side security requirements, but also the security concerns of AI algorithms.
UNISOC recently introduced new AIoT products, where the company officially announced IVY V5663 – a high-performance secure AIoT solution. With five outstanding features, including industry-leading technologies, powerful computing capability, security and reliability, rich sets of features, and ease of application development, IVY V5663 can be used extensively in diversified scenarios, such as smart home, healthcare, childhood education, aesthetic health care, warehousing and logistics. In order to enable the AIoT value chain, UNISOC has built an open and innovative development platform AILIGO to help developers better align technologies with scenarios, as well as improving the time-to-market for smart endpoints.
Designed for varied IoT applications, IVY V5663 is the first highly integrated AIoT solution with Wi-Fi 5 +BT 5 +MCU supports in China. It also integrates supports for the latest IEEE 802.11ac 2×2 Wi-Fi 5, 2.4GHz and 5GHz, dual mode classic BT and BT 5 and Wi-Fi & BT Mesh.
V5663 features an Arm Cortex-M33 dual-core processor architecture with operation frequency up to 442 MHz. Collaboration of two high-performance, programmable, ultra low power consumption processors ensures flexible scheduling and higher efficiency. This architecture also supports TrustZone security feature and fully functional DSP with ARMv8-M, with performance improvement by 20% compared with Cortex-M4.
Adopting advanced 22nm process, Wi-Fi throughput of V5663 is 11 times higher with 70% lower power consumption than the mainstream MCU Wi-Fi solutions in the market.
Moreover, indoor positioning based on fused Bluetooth AoD/AoA and Wi-Fi RTT supports precise positioning for applications like indoor navigation, reverse vehicle tracking and shopping mall traffic management. UNISOC is one of the few chip manufacturers in the industry to provide indoor positioning solutions based on fusion technology.
For AI-enabled voice recognition and interaction, V5663 provides a RTOS-based, high-performance smart voice solution. With Dhrystone performance up to 2.68 DMIPS/MHz, it is the most powerful ARM Cortex-M MCU with highest clock frequency worldwide.
V5663 is the world’s first fully-integrated RTOS-based AIoT solution. In contrast to the mainstream MCU Wi-Fi solutions, V5663 supports dual-mic voice activation. Built in embedded NS, AEC, DOA and KWS dual-mic algorithms, voice commands can be recognized, processed and interacted reliably even in complicated noisy environment. Besides, hardware based VAD of V5663 can significantly reduce system power consumption.
In addition to Arm Cortex-M TrustZone, IVY V5663 also integrates self development storage and peripheral isolation module, hardware encryption engine, true random number generator and other security features. With these hardware implementations, separated execution domain can be initiated by V5663 for protected and unprotected codes in a single core to provide system-wide hardware isolation for trusted software. Other SoC-level security features include hierarchical encryption and multilayer isolation. Starting from the inherent chip layer, V5663 is designed to offer comprehensive protection for IoT devices in terms of identity authentication, financial payment and information storage.
V5663 achieves the first ARM PSA Level 1 certification in China. Soon it will become one of the first AIoT solutions certified by Level 2, PSA in the world.
V5663 provides a comprehensive range of peripheral interfaces for application extension, including USB2.0/3.0, eMMC, PWM, PDM, IIS and SPI, which can directly connect to sensors, codec and high-speed devices to eliminate the fragmentation problem of embedded designs. Besides, it also supports programming under Mbed and FreeRTOS environments through a full suite of communication protocols and popular cloud protocols. Since, it would be considerably easier for developers to integrate V5663 in various IoT endpoints.
