
DSP Inside TI Radar Puts AI on Edge - rbanffy
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333330&_mc=RSS_EET_EDT
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etaioinshrdlu
I have programmed for the same c674x chips they mention as doing machine
learning ... Let's just say the have a mere fraction of the FLOPs that a
nvidia GPU or other "AI" processor would have.

Granted, good machine learning is not all about compute power, and you can
certainly do interesting things with less power. But this is not bleeding edge
deep learning for sure :)

On the other hand, TI is a company you can actually count on to work with you
to be able to build a product that can be verified to be dependable, in a
mission-critical, hard real time sense. TI open sources most of the software
stack.

NVIDIA, well, not so much. I've run into serious issues with their binary blob
drivers and their engineers have a rather DGAF attitude about the whole thing.
Secrecy and bluster are the name of the game. Torvalds' opinion on the matter
rings true.

TI just seems friendlier and less cutthroat. Their support of the BeagleBoard
etc is telling.

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rbanffy
You certainly won't want to train on a DSP, but running them shouldn't be too
much.

I too have nothing but great things to say about TI.

~~~
hyperpallium
Would it be plausible to train slowly on a DSP, if the data is also being
collected slowly, at the edge?

By the time you have a reasonable dataset, you've also had a reasonable amount
of training... of course, with only a little training on the complete dataset.

~~~
MarkMMullin
Depends on your model - in the majority of cases training is a separate act
from using the model, and just because you trained it doesn't mean it's well
fitted. You end up caring about training speed because you don't know how many
training runs you may have to do, grumpily fiddling with the model and
hyperparameters after each training session trying to get a good model.
Technically possible but probably not practical

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oldsklgdfth
The chip isn't very novel. There are various different configurations of
dsp/fpga and arm/powerPC/x86 used for RF.

Typically, the dsp or fpga is used to handle the time critical pieces, i.e.
generating RF, and the pc is there to command and collect data.

There are a variety of vendors you can choose from for this type of setup.
From SoC to PCIe fpga for a server, all depends on your applicatio.

The application to the automotive sector might be novel.

~~~
madengr
Disagree. mmWave on generic CMOS is very impressive. Sure, you can take a SiGe
or III-V front end, and marry that up to CMOS back ends, but then you don’t
meet the price point. Put in an FPGA, then you are way over price.

The baseband bandwidth for FMCW RADAR is not that much, so they are able to
pull this off with a DSP. It’s the RF integration that impressed me. I’m
presently using some ADI SiGe mmWave ICs (impressive themselves), and those
are close to $300 for the TX/RX pair, and that’s only the RF to analog
baseband. The TI part is $55 for a fully integrated chip. Just need a
PCB/antenna and supply regulators.

Short white paper here:

[http://www.ti.com/lit/an/swra592/swra592.pdf](http://www.ti.com/lit/an/swra592/swra592.pdf)

~~~
oldsklgdfth
I can see that.

I'm curious what kind of Rx sensitivity they can get for the HF range.

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brandmeyer
Woah: its < 80 USD at Digikey quantities. Nice to see tech like this that us
mere mortals can actually buy.

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Maven911
Just wondering, the last time I touched DSPs was in EE school. How can I keep
up interest in the field if I am working in a seperate field? Any good
resources and projects worth undertaking?

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taneq
I never thought it would be possible for a buzzword to annoy me more than
"cloud" did, and yet here we are.

~~~
godelmachine
Whats annoying you more than cloud?

~~~
taneq
"Edge", being "the edge of the cloud". It's the new buzzword for "Internet of
Things".

~~~
godelmachine
We need to understand that as platforms start offering different services
which serve different purposes, they start spawning platforms which become
independent of their predecessors.

They may be new buzzwords, but it's important to differentiate them so that
the use cases and end users they are targeting become more narrow and
specific.

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petermcneeley
If these are required for self driving is this a type of admit of defeat when
it comes to computer vision?

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tomohawk
Just what I want - millimeter wave radar blasting at me everywhere I go. Sure,
it's non-ionizing radiation, but where are the long term safety studies?

~~~
madengr
You’ll get more radiation standing in front of a microwave oven.

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dhimes
Seriously? I thought those were pretty well shielded.

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madengr
They are adequately shielded, but also have 1 kW resonating inside. They have
enough to meet the OSHA standard of 1 mW/cm^2.

The chip in question only emits 20 mW, and coupled into a 10 dB gain antenna,
the EIRP is still only a few 100 mW. Now spread that over a few 1000 cm^2, and
it’s not much at all.

For a fun experiment, put your phone in a microwave. Notice the WiFi bars go
to zero, but the cellular bars don’t change (much).

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flyinghamster
As long as you don't turn on the oven. Then the phone goes "bzzzzt-POP!" and
lets the magic smoke out. :)

