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Holoscan Sensor Bridge Solutions

NVIDIA Holoscan Sensor Bridge Solutions for AI Applications

Physical AI is driving an explosion of heterogeneous sensors — cameras, radar, lidar, and specialized instrumentation – creating a new challenge of ingesting and synchronizing massive amounts of real-time data. The bottleneck is shifting from AI compute to data movement, as GPUs depend on clean, synchronized, low-latency sensor data to make accurate decisions.

Altera® FPGAs act as the data plane for physical AI, performing sensor aggregation, protocol conversion, timestamping, pre-processing, and early fusion before data reaches the GPU. Holoscan Sensor Bridge provides the standardized sensor-over-Ethernet architecture that streams that data efficiently to AI compute platforms. As sensor count and bandwidth grow, architectures combining FPGAs, Holoscan Sensor Bridge, and GPUs will be essential for scalable, deterministic, real-time AI systems.

System Challenges

Many Protocols, One Ingest Path

Cameras, radar, lidar, IMUs, and specialized instrumentation each arrive on their own interface – MIPI, JESD204, HDMI, SDI, LVDS, CAN, SPI – while the AI compute platform expects one.
 

CPU-Mediated Capture vs. Real-Time Inference

Routing sensor traffic through the host CPU to reach GPU memory adds copies, interrupts, and scheduling variability that real-time inference cannot absorb.
 

Fixed-Function Bridges vs. Evolving Sensors

Sensor technology turns over faster than hardware design cycles, so an ASIC bridge chosen today may not carry the interfaces the next platform needs.
 

Why FPGAs

Fewer Cables, Longer Reach

Aggregating sensors into a standardized Ethernet path replaces bundles of short, point-to-point sensor cabling with standard networking media. Sensors can sit where the application needs them rather than where interface reach allows, simplifying harnessing and physical layout.
 

Many Sensors, One Aggregation Point

FPGA fabric implements sensor interfaces in hardware rather than selecting from a fixed set, so one device can ingest and aggregate a mixed population of sensors simultaneously. When a sensor changes or a new interface is added, the design is updated rather than respun.
 

Ultra-Low Latency by Construction

Capture, packetization, and preprocessing run as parallel hardware pipelines rather than scheduled software tasks. Data moves toward AI compute on a deterministic path, without the copies and scheduling variability that make software-mediated capture unpredictable.
 

Why Altera

Broadest Sensor Connectivity, Simplest GPU Integration

Altera FPGAs ingest and aggregate diverse sensor interfaces – MIPI, JESD204, HDMI, SDI, LVDS, CAN, SPI, and more – and present them to NVIDIA GPUs through a standardized Ethernet/RoCE-based Holoscan interface. This dramatically reduces sensor integration complexity across a wide range of AI and edge computing applications.
 

Ultra-Low-Latency Data Path for Physical AI

Altera combines high-performance Ethernet, packetization, preprocessing, and sensor fusion directly in FPGA fabric. The result is deterministic, low-latency delivery of sensor data into GPU memory for real-time AI inference workloads.

Scalable from Edge Sensors to High-Bandwidth AI Systems

With solutions spanning 1G to 400G Ethernet and support for platforms from NVIDIA Jetson* to DGX-class systems, Altera provides a single architecture that scales from embedded edge AI deployments to the most demanding multi-sensor GPU applications. Holoscan Sensor Bridge on Agilex® 5 SoC FPGAs earned Best in Show at Embedded World 2026, with working reference designs available today at 10G, 25G, and 100G.
 

25G Sensor Bridge Development Platform

Agilex 5 FPGA Holoscan Sensor Bridge - MIPI to 25GbE System Reference Design

This design demonstrates MIPI streaming via Holoscan Sensor Bridge IP over 25G Ethernet. It combines a 4Kp60 Multi-Sensor Camera with a new Quartus® Platform Designer component for the NVIDIA Holoscan Sensor Bridge IP, using the Agilex 5 FPGA and SoC E-Series Modular Dev. Kit (Group A Device). 

Visit FPGA GitHub Site
10G Sensor Bridge Development Platform

Agilex 5 Holoscan Sensor Bridge - MIPI to 10GbE System Reference Design

This design demonstrates MIPI streaming via Holoscan Sensor Bridge IP over 10G Ethernet. It combines a 4K Multi-Sensor Camera with the Holoscan Sensor Bridge IP, using the Agilex 5 FPGA E-Series Premium Dev Kit (ES version, Production version). 

Please visit the Altera FPGA GitHub site to access the example designs:

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100G Sensor Bridge Platform

Stratix® 10 Sensor Processing Kit Interface to the NVIDIA Holoscan Sensor Bridge

The Stratix 10 Sensor Processing Kit is a 100G Ethernet sensor interface platform powered by Altera’s Stratix 10 TX FPGA. It is designed to support real-time streaming of sensor data to GPU memory using NVIDIA Hololink IP and GPUDirect RDMA.

Request Access to Altera's Stratix 10 Sensor Bridge Example Design

Learn about the kit details, supplied by Altera partner, Terasic.

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