VIA Technologies Launches Edge AI Starter Kit, Powered by Its SOM-9X35 Module

Embedded specialist VIA Technologies has announced the launch of a new starter kit for its SOM-9X35 system-on-module, through which it claims it can "accelerate time to market" for edge AI projects.

"As AI moves increasingly to the edge, the demand for powerful and affordable edge devices with the power and flexibility to run intelligent vision applications such as facial, object, gesture, and motion recognition is rising at an exponential rate," claims VIA's Richard Brown. "By combining the core compute, video, and display components in a single package, the VIA SOM-9X35 Starter Kit enables our customers to jump-start the development of innovative devices to take advantage of these burgeoning market opportunities."

The heart of the starter kit is the VIA SOM-9X35, a system-on-module built around the MediaTek i350 system-on-chip with four Arm Cortex-A53 cores running at up to 2GHz, an Arm Mali-G52 MCI graphics processor running at up to 800MHz, MediaTek's in-house APU 1.0 edge AI coprocessor running at up to 500MHz, and a HiFi4 digital signal processor (DSP) along with 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB of LPDDR4 memory and 16GB of flash.

The module is housed on a VAB-935 carrier which includes HDMI 1.4 and four-lane MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) video outputs, a four-lane MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) connector with optional second camera port, on-board microphone with 3.5mm input, output, and speaker headers, 10/100 Ethernet, two USB 2.0 Host and one micro-USB 2.0 On-The-Go (OTG) ports, an RS-232 connector, 40-pin Raspberry Pi-style general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header and secondary digital input/output (DIO) header with 10 available pins.

To get system designers up to speed as quickly as possible, VIA is also bundling a 7" 1024×600 MIPI LCD touchscreen display, a 13-megapixel camera module, two speakers, and a microphone, while the kit includes dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 connectivity — plus a mini-PCI Express (mPCIe) slot for an optional 4G cellular modem. Software images are provided for Android 10 and a Linux distribution built via the Yocto Project 3.1.

Oddly, while VIA has confirmed the launch of the starter kit — and the ability to buy the SOM itself, once you've designed your own carrier — it did not share pricing. More information can be found on the company's product page.