Infineon Announces a Partnership to Drive the Future of NVIDIA Jetson Thor Humanoid Robots
Partnership, announced at the Hot Chips conference this week, will see Infineon's microcontrollers and sensors integrated with Jetson Thor.
Infineon Technologies has announced that it will bring its microcontroller, sensor, and smart actuator lineups to NVIDIA's newly-launched Jetson Thor series of high-performance systems-on-modules for robotics and edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) projects — with a particular focus on powering the next generation of humanoid robotics with embodied AI.
"We are excited to collaborate with NVIDIA, a leader and innovator in the humanoid robotics space," says Infineon's chief executive Jochen Hanebeck of the partnership. "By combining our microcontroller, sensor, and smart actuator expertise with NVIDIA accelerated computing technology, we will deliver a simple, integrated, and scalable solution to our customers, reducing their time to market significantly. Infineon enables the key functional blocks in humanoid robots with a broad portfolio of dedicated products and technologies — from power switches to microcontrollers, sensors and connectivity. We empower humanoid robots to sense, move, act and connect. Safe and secure."
"NVIDIA Jetson Thor is designed to accelerate the future of physical AI and robotics," adds NVIDIA's Deepu Talla, vice-president for robotics and edge AI at the company. "Infineon is bringing their broad product and technology portfolio to the Jetson Thor ecosystem to help accelerate customers' time-to-market by creating more efficient, powerful and scalable motor control solutions for humanoid robots."
NVIDIA formally launched the Jetson Thor range, via the Jetson AGX Thor Developer Kit and DRIVE AGX Thor Developer Kit for autonomous vehicle projects, at the Hot Chips conference this week, after opening pre-orders for the development kit earlier a week prior. For $3,499, buyers get a Blackwell-based module featuring a claimed 2,070 tera-floating point operations per second (TFLOPS) of compute for sparse FP4 workloads, 1TB of integrated storage, a five-gigabit-Ethernet port and a QSFP28 connector supporting up to four 25-gigabit connections — plus access, of course, to the Jetson development ecosystem.
The partnership with Infineon will include support for the company's PSOC and AURIX microcontroller families, with a view to providing the parts of a humanoid robotic system the NVIDIA Jetson Thor modules don't include. This includes, the company claims, "seamless" integration between the PSOC Control C3 microcontroller family and NVIDIA's Holoscan Sensor Bridge. "PSOC Control devices are well-suited for implementing so-called field-oriented-control (FOC) algorithms," the company notes, "which are widely used for precise motor control due to their ability to reduce noise and provide stable torque output which decreases vibrations in humanoid system designs."
More information on the company's microcontrollers are available on the Infineon website, while pre-orders for the Jetson AGX Thor Developer Kit are open via the NVIDIA website.