Packet-Based NPUs In The LLM Era: From Compute-Bound CNNs To Memory-Bound Edge And Automotive Workloads

Packet-Based NPUs In The LLM Era: From Compute-Bound CNNs To Memory-Bound Edge And Automotive Workloads

Many Semiconductor Engineering readers know the basic story behind Expedera’s Origin NPU IP architecture: packets instead of layers, higher MAC utilization, and less gratuitous movement of activations to external memory. What’s changing now is the workload mix. Vision-only edge processors are giving way to systems where LLMs, VLMs and generative features sit alongside traditional perception networks in smartphones, vehicles and embedded gateways…