In markets across the world, continuous demand for higher bandwidth scales beyond what today's technologies and form factors can support. The demand is for more efficient, pervasive compute that scales beyond what CPU and GPU technologies can match.

I get asked this question a lot in my interactions with customers. Okay, maybe not phrased exactly like that, but more or less along the same lines: “Why should I move to Versal® ACAP and is now the right time to do so?” It’s a great question, and the answer is easy… “It depends.” Okay, maybe not so easy after all! To be fair, there are many considerations including the design requirements/resources, how much of the design can leverage the tremendous amount of hard IP in Versal ACAPs, library and soft IP availability, silicon availability, and production timelines, etc. So the answer really does vary depending on the factors at play. We’ll converse on a number of these topics in future blog posts, but today I wanted to focus a bit more on the question of “why Versal” and provide a specific customer example.

Versal HBM Series is now available for early customer access.

Check out new milestones for the Versal series - the industry's first adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP)

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) – including machine learning (ML) and deep learning techniques (DL) is poised to become a transformational force in medical imaging. Patients, healthcare service providers, hospitals, professionals, and various stakeholders in the ecosystem all stand to benefit from ML driven tools. From anatomical geometric measurements to cancer detection, the possibilities are endless. In these scenarios, ML can lead to increased operational efficiencies and generate positive outcomes. 

There’s a broad spectrum of ways that ML can be used in medical imaging. For example, radiology, dermatology, vascular diagnostics, digital pathology and ophthalmology all use standard image processing techniques.

What is XSWG, and how is it going to help protect Industrial and Healthcare IoT assets?

200+ users are following Xilinx’s call to join the 2019 Xilinx Security Working Group (XSWG) events in San Jose, CA, Longmont, CO, Washington, D.C, and Munich, Germany. In our fifth year of hosting XSWGs, each of these four worldwide events are vivid and interactive exchanges between Xilinx customers, partners, and industry authorities. Xilinx architects, field application engineers (FAEs), and strategy owners from Xilinx’s market segments (industrial, vision, healthcare & sciences, automotive, and aerospace & defense) gather to teach, learn, and share security information. Xilinx’s Center of Excellence for Safety and Security guides the participants through the sessions with in-depth presentations and previewed information about innovations that will be released later this year - under NDA, of course.

Manuel Uhm, Director of Silicon Marketing at Xilinx, spoke with Signals & Bits about Xilinx’s new Versal® ACAPs. Manuel walks through the motivation behind the ACAP and Xilinx’s vision to reach all types of developers. He then describes the Versal portfolio, all device series, and how each addresses a specific set of applications—ranging from AI in the cloud to edge systems.