Microchip Technology Incorporated (MCHP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Family of FPGAs Power High-Speed Video and Imaging with Expanded CoaXPress Support. My name is Emily. And before I get started, I'm going to play a quick housekeeping video. [Presentation]

Now we've covered those housekeeping items. I would like to remind you to please utilize the engagement tools available for you to use start today's session at the menu bar at the bottom part of your screen. Now without further ado, I'm going to introduce our presenter for today's session, Apurva Peri. Apurva, please take it away.

Hi, everyone. Thank you, Emily. Hello, and welcome to the webinar today. Thank you for joining in. I'm Apurva, and I drive industrial product marketing for FPGAs at Microchip. And today, the topic to the webinar is High-Speed Video and Imaging with CoaXPress. What's on the agenda today, I'm going to talk a little bit about what CoaXPress and GenICam are, a little bit of details about each of these protocols and what applications they used in followed by the PolarFire FPGA implementation for CoaXPress, which will also include a small video clipping of a demonstration followed by our Smart Embedded Vision portfolio using PolarFire FGPA, which is tailormade for edge applications and I'll tell you why. So let's get started. What is CoaXPress. It is a royalty-free open standard for point-to-point serial communication. And it's a preferred standard for high-performance, high vision processing type of applications. So it can carry high resolutions, offers low latencies. So the current standard for CoaXPress, which is available as part of our solution is CoaXPress 2.0, which offers up to 12.5 Gbps of data and over 40 meters of cable length. So it's not just the standard and support just video data, but also power delivery and camera control and trigger data and so on. So it's great for extended reach with low latencies. The image you see on your screen is that of a single lane setup, single channel of CoaXPress with a single frame grabber on the host side, but this is easily scalable. So you can like build a 4-channel frame grabber, which will give you up to 50 Gbps of video data and also scale it to two 4 channel frame grabber, so essentially 8 channels, which can potentially give you 100 Gbps of video data transfer. So what typical applications -- we talked about features and benefits on the previous slide. So intuitively, anything that requires long distance, high data rate, low-latency video transmission, CoaXPress becomes a popular choice, one such being a lot of medical -- inspection medical devices like endoscopes, intraoral inspection, even surgical microscopes. So there CoaXPress is used heavily. Also, any type of factory automation, industrial automation, like inspection for food, 3D optical inspection and semiconductor plants and so on would use a co-express protocol. And any generic machine vision protocol like surveillance and security. CoaXPress is easily retrofitted, simplified because a lot of these legacy systems use coaxial cables already, and so that makes retrofitting these much simpler. And in our experience, specifically with the PolarFire FPGA CoaXPress solution, we've seen significant success in the medical space, and specifically manufacturers that develop endoscope applications. So what you see on your screen is one such high-level example. So on the camera side, you have an image sensor interface. It could be MIPI based, it could be in the SLVS-EC based, it could be simple LVDS signals, whatever it may be, that is processed by a PolarFire FPGA converted to CoaXPress data with our IP, and that is sent over, again, Microchip's CoaXPress PHY to the host side. Now the host side again, can be another PolarFire FPGA which can do a bunch of more processing after converting this data back to whatever format is required. Or an industry standard frame grabber, which I'll talk a little bit more about in subsequent slides. But the application is fairly simple. But it has extremely stringent particular specific requirements, intuitively so because it is in medical application, one that comes directly in contact with the human body and no errors can be pardoned. So this whole setup that you see here functions at a temperature way below 45 degree Celsius, so thermal constraints taken care of. And also, we offer -- this is the PolarFire 100 device, which comes in 11x11 package as well. So it's a very small form factor, and then offer up to 50% lower power than most of our competitive devices. So that's a popular medical application successful story that we had. And the second thing is the GenICam standard. So the PolarFire CoaXPress solution offers compatibility with GenICam. It inherently supports the standard. What is GenICam, it's a unified API for camera control. Now, in respect -- it is agnostic of what transport interface is being used. So it could be CoaXPress. It could be something USB based, it could be Ethernet base. But the goal is to standardize camera control and how we host interacts with the camera on the device side. So there is essentially a single XML file which stores, both technology -- specific and technology agnostic information like a registered information and some all the controls that can be controlled in the camera, describing the registered space of a device. And this is typically provided by a camera manufacturer, and this information can be shared back and forth and controlled by a host. So our solution supports all of the functions that are specified by the standard itself. Okay, what the PolarFire FPGA CoaXPress solution looks like, specifically a little insight into that. So what you see on your screen is the demonstration setup, the kit to the right includes camera sensors, it's a CoaXPress device board, also includes the PolarFire 100 FPGA device and Microchip's EqcoLogic CoaXPress PHY, which does equalization as well. So incoming video stream is transmitted over coaxial cable. And then on the cost side, we are again using over FMC, another CoaXPress PHY, which receives the incoming data and then the PolarFire video kit, the kit in green uses this data to convert it into raw, store it in [Indiscernible] and do a bunch of processing. And as a bare minimum, this particular demo displays it using an HDMI compatible screen -- display screen. So that at a high level, you have incoming data over MIPI, converted to CoaXPress, transmitted coaxial cable, received by PolarFire FPGA processing done on it and then the split. And the demo setup I showed you on the host side was a PolarFire FGPA. But this setup would also work with any industry standard frame grabber. We have tested specifically for interoperability with all of the off-the-shelf popular devices. And if you want more information about interoperability and what it means for each of these devices, you'll find more information in our CoaXPress application note, which will be in your resource section. So a little insight into what the video flow, the pipeline looks like, starting from the image center all the way to the PolarFire kit. So initially, there is a single stream of video coming in over MIPI CSI-2, and this is 4K-video at 30 frames per second, which is converted using the CoaXPress IP, device side IP, that's running on the PolarFire 500 device, which converts MIPI data into CoaXPress data. And then this data is transmitted over coaxial cable. This is specifically done using the Microchip CoaXPress EqcoLogic 5, which is then received by host IP on the PolarFire host site, which converts us back to raw video and storage is done on EDR, which by the way is onboard the PolarFire video kit. And for the purposes of demonstration, we run a bunch of ISP. So the color filter array is converted to our RGB format. We have contrast, brightness, color balance running as basic ISP. We also displayed this on an HDMI compatible display like I talked about earlier. And the solution comes with a graphical user interface, which includes two big functions. Firstly, controlling camera settings and interacting with the device side over GenICam, and the second is providing for ISP control, which I will talk about a little bit later. So the GUI is able to retrieve and display the XML file over GenICam standard. So we talked about the video flow, how things work end-to-end. But I want to give you some insight into what is specifically happening on the device side, on the emit sensor side, how GenICam is enabled, what is -- what does the interaction look like. So that's the image on the left, the block diagram that is titled PolarFire FGPA CoaXPress Device Board. It is running a soft risk by CPU, which is called the Mi-V Soft CPU, which essentially does three main functions. It's running the GenICam API and the GenICam transport layer. It is also driving the camera sensor and it's running the drivers and interacting with it directly. It also controls the camera registered space. And lastly, it maintains and controls the XML file as specified by the GenICam standard. Now this Soft CPU directly interacts with the CoaXPress device IP, which then takes care of the remaining video flow and functions that we talked about earlier. So that's what this looks like. Now this is the device side, and this doesn't change. It's a fixed function, irrespective of what is on the other side. So the host could be a standard industrial frame grabber from any third-party device, like the one you see here, that's the example. But it could also be a PolarFire video kit, for instance, which serves as a proof of concept as well as a ready-to-use reference solution that you could like used to jump start your application development. So it works either way. So that's how the device and host interact. And we talked about the graphical user interface, which includes ISP control as well as GenICam functions. And this is a snapshot of what is offered. So on the left side, you can see you have ISP control. For alpha blending, you can enter values in real time and see them change on the screen. For contrast, brightness, color balance as well. Then on the right side highlighted in green is the GenICam function. So what you're seeing is the XML file, a copy of it. You can manipulate and change some of these values as specified by the standard. You can export this XML file, redo it, write from -- read from it or write to it and so on and so forth. You can also control the video in the sense that you can start and stop the video over this graphical user interface. So it's a fully functional multi-control sort of interface. And these are the GenICam commands that we support inherently if you're using the video kit. You can read and export the XML file, start and stop video like we talked about, and also flip the video, both horizontally or vertically, generate a test pattern instead of using a camera, stream, can read and write bootstrap registers and also in real time change the data rate. But of course, these are the supported data rates as specified by the CoaXPress standard. So like I mentioned, we have a short clipping of video. Now this video will outline the PolarFire side CoaXPress card with the image sensor, working in tandem with a third-party host that is plugged in over PCI to a Windows machine. I hope you can see the video. So what you're looking at is a third-party frame grabber that has connected over PCI to a Window's machine. And on the outside connected over coaxial cable. What you can see is the PolarFire CoaXPress device card with the image sensors plugged in. And this is currently not turned on yet. But when it does turn on -- we have a laptop station in front -- right in front of this camera sensor. So that is the video stream we'll be able to see when we turn this on. Okay, there you go. This is over HDMI. We're able to see live stream of video. We have a laptop that's playing a Microchip video. So you can see that. You can also control various aspects of that video and the camera over GenICam in real time. So this is a working video of a single instance. We do have a similar setup working and running for multiple other third-party frame grabbers and the PolarFire video kit, right. So we talked about CoaXPress, we talked about GenICam, we talked about the solution. But what we are -- what the goal of the solution and it's targeting the application is at the edge. It's become common knowledge that everyone is moving intelligence to the edge, be it aerospace and defense, 5G networks, industrial network, medical, and you name it, everyone is moving intelligence to edge. There has been a recent report that was published that says that 75% of enterprise-generated data will move to the edge by 2025, which is but just a year from now. So that's where the future of applications is headed. We are fully cognizant of it. And we believe at the core of a lot of these edge applications is some sort of vision processing. And vision processing at the edge has a set of unique specific demand. For instance, they have very low power budgets. They are oftentimes battery powered and remote. Thermal constraints, you do not -- cannot afford the additional budget for heat sinks or fans. At the same time, the performance requirement is pretty high. You want high resolutions, improve the accuracy of object detection and so on. You want to be run multiple 4K channels, 8K channels, even integrate at the bare minimum basic AI and ML, inferencing just to do like basic task. And intuitively, of course, safety and security, always a big factor for every type of application, especially at the edge where a lot of devices could possibly potentially be remote and unmanned. So a security breach on such devices could be catastrophic. And so our Smart Embedded Vision portfolio, specifically caters to a lot of these applications with the PolarFire FGPA. And we have a fully comprehensive end-to-end solution. It's a one-stop shop. We have an IP portfolio, supporting evaluation hardware solutions. And of course, this is all bolstered by our PolarFire Family of FGPAs . So what you're looking at a new screen is our IP portfolio, which spans the entire video pipeline, starting from the image sensor. So we have interfaces for MIPI for SLVS-EC, followed by all the key basic image processing protocols and methodologies, memory controllers, deep learning inference, again, something we offer in-house, compression algorithms like H.264, mJPEG and a whole host of popular industry standard display interfaces and transport interfaces. CoaXPress 2.0, which supports up to 12.5 Gbps is one such transport interface, which is what we talked about today. Now some of these we develop in-house. Some are partner developed. But irrespective, they support our entire IP spanning -- spanning the entire video pipeline. And like I mentioned, we have application specific purpose-built hardware to support evaluation of these IP and reference solutions. The first one being the PolarFire video kit which includes dual camera sensors with FMC and HDMI. We saw this in a demonstration today, part of it at least. And then we have a kit with the PolarFire SoC video kit, which builds on -- includes all the features that the PolarFire video kit offers and builds on it by adding Linux, PCI and dual gigabit ethernet board. We also additionally include portfolio FMCs, which add as expansion cards, which range from USXGMII to SDI. And of course, one such is our CoaXPress FMC card, which includes the device side card as well as the host side card. So with our PolarFire Family of FPGAs, we have truly established power efficiency leadership. And this is evident in the unprecedented growth we've seen in our portfolio. So in this year alone, we've seen 31% growth, which is way above average industrial growth for similar competing devices and 65% -- over 65% of our top customers are at the intelligent edge. So we tailor our solutions and a lot of our IP and -- to meet the demands at the edge, there are specific product lines that solve those unique challenges. And lastly, in its fifth year since introduction, PolarFire has seen 90% year-on-year growth. And this is purely bolstered by our power efficiency leadership exemplified by the fact that PolarFire offers 2x the power efficiency as compared to most of our competitive -- competing devices. So that brings me to the end of our webinar today, a quick summary of what we talked about. So CoaXPress 2.0 evidently plays a crucial role in the future of machine vision applications, perform -- in terms of performance -- high performance, low latency, long reach type of applications. With the PolarFire FPGA CoaXPress solution, is a very comprehensive one, we offer evaluation hardware, IP and reference solution which serves as both a proof of concept and a ready -- ready template for you to get started on your application development very quickly. We support GenICam interface inherently. So great for interoperability, you can pick up any third-party frame grabber, and it will work with our PolarFire FGPA. And we've seen tremendous success with a lot of customers, especially in the medical and industrial automation space that we specifically won, of course, because of PolarFire's exemplary feature set, but also because of our CoaXPress solution. So I do request that you stay tuned. We are working on an upgraded support to include multilane support with CoaXPress for high data rates. So watch our website for more information. And if you have any questions, comments, concerns about what we talked about today, please feel free to write into [email protected], and we'd be more than happy to help you. That brings me to the end of it. If you want any help with the resources, application notes, reference solutions, kits -- where to purchase the kit. All of those links will be provided to you under the resource section. So do check them out. They should serve as a handy tool for you to get started quickly. That is all I have for today. Thank you, Emily. Over to you.

Yes. Thank you, Apurva, and thank you to our audience for attending. We do have some questions that I am going to ask Apurva. For starters, what lower speeds are supported by the CoaXPress IP on PolarFire?

Okay. So the PolarFire CoaXPress IP supports 6P, starting from 1.25 Gbps all the way to 12.5 Gbps. This is as specified by the standard, and this is a downstream support. We also support for low speed signaling, an upstream speeds of 20 mbps or 40 mbps, again, as specified by the standard. So it's a comprehensive solution that supports all the speeds as specified.

Great. Another one that came in is, what is the resource utilization and cost of the IP?

Okay. So the device -- there are 2 parts to the IP. So the host side IP utilized about 7,000 LUTs and the device side about 8,000 LUTs. Now the IP is license locked for the clear RTL. So if you want to purchase that, that would be $5,000, available on Microchip Direct. But the encrypted version is available for free. We also offer a test bench with the IP to test and check both the host and the device side. So I recommend you if you want to go and check that, that would be great place to start.

Great. Another question is, I'm using PolarFire SoC in my current design. Can I use this IP with it?

Yes, of course, it's compatible. The IP is developed for the PolarFire FPGA fabric portion, and you can use it both on PolarFire and PolarFire SoC. This will also be mentioned in the IP user guide. So take a look at that and you should get more information.

And finally, a question, what will the multichannel solution include?

Okay. Early days, but we are working on developing potentially a 4-channel CoaXPress solution, so that might be able to support up to 50 Gbps. But again, so do watch our Smart Embedded Vision web page for more information, we will release it as and when it's available.

That's all the questions that we have from today's audience. Again, thank you, Apurva, as usual. And thank you to our audience for attending today's session. As a reminder, you can utilize the link that you used to register to watch on-demand at your convenience. Thank you.