Eight TOPS on a 52 by 45 Millimetre Module

Boardcon's CM311Y3 system-on-module is built around the Amlogic A311Y3: two Cortex-A78 cores at 2.4 GHz, six Cortex-A55 at 2.0 GHz, RISC-V cores for system control, and an 8 TOPS NPU. The module measures 52 by 45 millimetres on an eight-layer board in a 0.9 mm pitch QFN package, with 4, 8 or 16 GB of LPDDR5 or LPDDR5X and 32 to 256 GB of eMMC. Interfaces include dual MIPI CSI camera inputs, an HDMI receiver, and display outputs covering HDMI Tx, MIPI DSI, LVDS, eDP and VX1. It runs Android 16 with Linux 6.12.69.

The specification worth pausing on is the NPU's numeric format support: INT4, INT8, INT16, FP8, FP16 and BF16. That breadth matters more than the headline TOPS figure, because TOPS is quoted at the lowest precision the hardware supports and real applications rarely run there. A model quantised to INT8 may lose acceptable accuracy; the same model at INT4 may not. Hardware that can execute both, plus the floating-point formats used during fine-tuning, lets the deployment decision be made on measured accuracy rather than forced by what the silicon will run.

The dual MIPI CSI inputs and the HDMI receiver point at the intended applications — vision systems that take two camera feeds, or that ingest video from existing equipment. Two synchronised cameras are the minimum for stereo depth or for inspecting two faces of a part in one station, and having both interfaces on the module rather than on a carrier saves the design work that usually sits between a demo and a product.

The SoM form factor itself is the commercial argument. A system-on-module lets a manufacturer put the difficult, fast-changing part of the design — processor, memory, power sequencing, high-speed routing — onto a qualified board someone else maintains, and keep their own carrier design simple, cheap and stable. When the processor generation turns over, the carrier survives.

Boardcon also offers the Idea311Y3 development board at 155 by 115 millimetres, adding microSD, M.2 NVMe, Wi-Fi 5, optional 4G LTE and dual gigabit Ethernet — the usual evaluation path before committing a carrier design.