Innodisk Launches AMD Xilinx Kria K26-Powered Computer Vision FPGA Board EXMU-X261
Designed for use with its recently-launched USB camera modules, this powerful FPGA board looks to inject edge AI into industry.
Innodisk has announced an embedded development board aimed at the embedded computer vision market, packing an AMD Xilinx Kria K26 field-programmable gate-array (FPGA) system-on-module (SOM) and offering four USB 3.1 Gen 1. ports plus two M.2 slots for expansion.
Designed primarily with industrial use in mind — Innodisk's announcement focuses heavily on machine vision for automated defect inspection in manufacturing facilities — the compact computer uses an AMD Xilinx Kria K26 module, giving it four Arm Cortex-A53 processor cores, 250k logic cells, and H.264 and H.265 encoding and decoding hardware accelerators.
Elsewhere on the board, which was brought to our attention by CNX Software, is a single HDMI 1.4 video outputs, four USB 3.1 Gen. 1 Type-A ports, an M.2 2230 E-key slot with one lane of PCI Express Gen. 2 and USB 2.0, an M.2 2242 M-key socket with four lanes of PCI Express Gen. 3, a gigabit Ethernet port, and microSD storage slot.
What there isn't, interestingly, is any dedicated camera connector such as MIPI DSI. Instead, Innodisk is expecting users to connect cameras to the board's USB ports — an unsurprising decision, given the company's launch of USB cameras for machine vision work back in October. The board also includes a 15-pin terminal block offering five general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, a single UART bus, two CAN buses, and one I2C bus.
Accepting a 9-15V DC power input, Innodisk claims the board — dubbed the EXMU-X261 — draws around 12W at load, though this will depend on connected peripherals and how many FPGA resources are in use, with a teased housing design showcasing a large aluminum heatsink for passive cooling. The company also promises full support in its AI Suite software development kit (SDK), complete with a model zoo for the FPGA and a remote management offering.
More information on the board is available on the Innodisk website, though the company has not yet announced general availability and pricing.
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