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It has been a long way since we started UP AI Edge campaign, where UP Core Plus, Net Plus, Vision Plus X and AI Plus were introduced. In the past summer, we finally completed all AI Edge series development and shipment except
UP AI Plus.

It’s been a tough decision for UP, but we would like to share it honestly to our community, UP AI Plus was the first attempt for UP team to develop a FPGA board, which aims to provide its possibilities to target heterogeneous platforms with Intel® CPUs and FPGAs to accelerate your AI projects.

FPGA itself can be reprogrammed and is able to implement real-time inferencing of a model, which led to us towards a vision of deploying FPGA for AI inferencing in a way of high flexibility and low latency.
We conducted trial and error for months, however, the development was not going well as we expected. The major insuperable obstacles, such as drivers and I/O enabling functionality, were depended on our software partners. At the last phase of development, Intel® Cyclone® 10 GX could not deploy the integration with Intel® OpenVINO™ toolkit, therefore, we cannot make all features work as wished.

After our validation process, we are unable to move this UP AI Plus board into mass production as a community support board. However, we see another feasibility from our partner, Grazper, who has done a great job to demo the power of UP AI Plus with featuring demographics (face detection and gender recognition). For that reason, we would recommend this UP AI Plus board for intermediate developers. Thereupon, without the full-range support for our customers, we decided to make this product as a project base product.

With all that being said AI Plus will be transferred to ODM board. From there, we can invite capable partners or yourself to work deliver the functions based on the project specification. Thank you so much for waiting for our UP AI Plus. We have learned the valuable experiences and will definitely reference it for our next items.