Profile: AptCore

AptCore image processing

AptCore was founded in 2010 in Bristol to design special-purpose programmable DSP cores.

Its first product, a radar processor called ACR10x, has already broken into the highly conservative automotive market – products containing it are on the road today. To this it is now adding image processing cores.

“We do IP [intellectual property] for silicon SoCs and FPGAs. What sets us apart is that we specialise in programmable high-efficiency DSP cores,” CEO Jim Hutchinson told Electronics Weekly.

According to him, the firm’s approach is a novel architecture between the two traditional approaches of general purpose DSP or fixed-function (FFT, for example) DSP blocks.

“The beauty of ours is that it is still programmable, and you can get close to area of fixed function,” said Hutchinson, who claims FFT efficiency close to 100%, compared to 30-40% peak for standard DSPs.

Staff backgrounds include not only radar and graphics processing, but efficient data movement in supercomputers.

The products are designed to complement an ARM processor

“If you are using one of our cores, you might be needing to do some high-performance radar processing on an SoC. There will be a small ARM core to do the background and operating system, and then our processing core will to do the heavy lifting for radar tasks,” said Hutchinson.

Why don’t your customers use an ARM core, and an ARM video processor to crunch the maths?

“Our core is specifically for radar, with an optimised way to move data around and just the right mix of functional units. By using it, you get a smaller more power-efficient SoC,” said Hutchinson.

To cope with applications with different processing demands – single or multi-beam automotive radars, for example – AptCore’s product can be scaled by adding more cores.

“You put down sufficient cores to handle the bandwidth – you can put lots down – and to the programmer they will look like one core because they are accessed via a library of functions we provide. It just looks like they are programming an ARM core,” said Hutchinson.

Financially, 2010 was not the UK’s proudest year.

“We started just at the wrong time, it wasn’t easy. But because we were offering something different, we rode it out,” said Hutchinson. “Things are picking up now, the market is growing: with adaptive cruise control, blind spot detection and collision avoidance in cars.”

Artificial vision cameras are another technology used in driver assistance and collision avoidance – sometimes combined with radar – and AptCore has just branched out into what it terms ‘optical’ processing with a core called ACP10x.

ACP is intended for applications including ‘Harris corner detect’, ‘histogram of oriented gradients’ (HOG) and ‘canny edge detect’ (see photo).

‘This new core is programmable and will provide a flexible option for those requiring pixel-based image processing,” said AptCore technical director Tim Styles. “The ability to scale the number of cores means that any level of performance can be catered for. This means engineers using this core will not have to change their code as increased performance is required.”

A derivative of the ACP, in FPGA form, is already involved in an automotive collision avoidance system trial.

“It is also likely that it will be used for image processing within the Venturer driverless car project based in Bristol,” said AptCore – scheduled to be launched in June.

Beyond this, details of a higher-level optical processor will be announced soon. “It’s for optical flow and that sort of thing,” Hutchinson told Electronics Weekly.

Bristol is best

What does Hutchinson think of Bristol?

“Bristol has a huge talent pool. It is a very good area, one of the best in the world. There is a real buzz around the place,” he said.

steve bush

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