Imagination Blog

Smart home gateways reinvented for the IoT generation Monday, 12th June 1837 is a significant date in the telecommunications industry. On that day William Fothergill Cooke, along with Charles Wheatstone, a professor at King’s College London, were granted a patent for an invention that would ultimately become the basis for all digital wired communications. They invented the electric telegraph. Following … Continued

The future: it’s not what it was. When I was young in the 1980s, the technology depicted in TV shows and movies seemed fantastically futuristic. What’s remarkable, and arguably slightly disconcerting, is how much of it is becoming a reality. No, we can’t yet beam-up anywhere, but Star Trek’s communicator has long since become an everyday object to billions of … Continued

Linux has become the general purpose operating system of choice for embedded systems and is almost always supported for high-end SoCs developed by the semiconductor vendors. Most vendors use the open source Linux distribution, then build a custom distribution representing the device tree supported for the specific SoC, and include the necessary drivers for the peripherals on the SoC, as … Continued

This blog post introduces GRLAA (GRadient Line Anti-Aliasing), a relatively simple and efficient method designed to cope with aliased lines, which can often crop up in automotive navigation applications. In the discipline of signal processing, there is a specific sampling frequency called the Nyquist frequency. When sampling a signal at a frequency lower than the Nyquist frequency, the signal reconstructed … Continued

The automotive market is one of the most exciting sectors in the technology ecosystem, and as a result the industry is constantly fluctuating and evolving in order to keep at the forefront of new technology. This means the underlying hardware which powers the system must not only deliver great performance but must also be versatile. The automotive industry is a … Continued

Imagination is known for its chip IP for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets and has has a strong reputation as a market leader with regards to performance, power and area. Complementing this, Imagination also has IP related to ray tracing, a technique considered to be the ‘holy grail’ for computer graphics enabling the development of ultra-realistic lighting in … Continued

Having recently returned from another exciting Embedded Vision Summit show we’d like to share our thoughts in a blog post. This year’s event once again impressed, with compelling conversations and discussions about vision and surrounding technologies setting the event apart from other less focused conferences. After the show we came away with the feeling that machine learning was surely at … Continued

How MIPS virtualization for gateways brings business benefits to operators. The “Internet of Things” promises to make everyone’s lives simpler and easier. However, the abundance of IoT devices now being introduced to our homes is already beginning to become unmanageable. IoT devices are often accompanied by an IoT hub – essentially a small gateway, whose sole purpose is to act … Continued

The Internet of Things remains one of the hot topics of the day as it starts to come good on its promise to transform businesses and homes, with more and more devices gaining connectivity. Earlier this year, Gartner estimated that this year up to 8.4 billion ‘things’ will be connected with total spending reaching almost $2 trillion in 2017. By … Continued

It’s been six months or so since our last PowerVR Tools and SDK update but the latest version has arrived, bringing with it a number of enhancements. Tools In terms of our tools, we’ve carried out a number of improvements thanks to your feedback regarding the 2016 R2 release. First, let’s talk about PVRGeoPOD. The standalone version now features an … Continued

Last night, at the IndustryWeek M&T Expo in Cleveland Ohio, Imagination’s Creator Ci40 development board was announced as the winner of the 2017 NED Innovation Award. The award, which celebrates the most disruptive innovations in industrial technology, is picked from a shortlist compiled annually by the NED team, who are looking for products that deliver new capabilities and new levels of efficiency … Continued

With billions of IoT devices being deployed and trillions of dollars at stake, it is very critical to make correct decisions when selecting the architecture of the tiny smart “thing” or the sensor edge node. This miniature connected edge sensor not only has to provide critical data but has to ensure that it is secure and all of this has … Continued

These days we seem to take it for granted how powerful and sophisticated computers have become. We can talk to our phones and our Bluetooth speakers and they will respond with context-aware information; in certain cars you can take your hands off the wheel and let yourself be carried down the road by electronics, and we can share messages and … Continued

This week at the Embedded Vision Summit in California we are showcasing our latest Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) object recognition demo. Since launching the original demo at last year’s EVS, the demo has been expanded to include multiple network models and is now implemented using Imagination’s own graph compilation library – IMG DNN. What are CNNs? Before continuing, a quick … Continued

First unveiled by John Hennessy at Standford in the 1980s, last year the MIPS CPU architecture celebrated 30 years since its first introduction. ‘Clean’ and ‘elegant’ are words that are often used to describe the Reduced Instruction Set architecture of the MIPS processor and this makes it a great starting place for anyone that wants to make a start learning … Continued