BrainChip Introduces Lowest-Power AI Acceleration Co-Processor

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BrainChip Holdings Ltd, the world’s first commercial producer of ultra-low power, fully digital, event-based, brain-inspired AI, today introduced the Akida™ Pico, the lowest power acceleration co-processor that enables the creation of very compact, ultra-low power, portable and intelligent devices for wearable and sensor integrated AI into consumer, healthcare, IoT, defense and wake-up applications.

Akida Pico accelerates limited use case-specific neural network models to create an ultra-energy efficient, purely digital architecture. Akida Pico enables secure personalization for applications including voice wake detection, keyword spotting, speech noise reduction, audio enhancement, presence detection, personal voice assistant, automatic doorbell, wearable AI, appliance voice interfaces and more.

The latest innovation from BrainChip is built on the Akida2 event-based computing platform configuration engine, which can execute with power suitable for battery-powered operation of less than a single milliwatt. Akida Pico provides power-efficient footprint for waking up microcontrollers or larger system processors, with a neural network to filter out false alarms to preserve power consumption until an event is detected. It is ideally suited for sensor hubs or systems that need to be monitored continuously using only battery power with occasional need for additional processing from a host.

BrainChip’s exclusive MetaTF™ software flow enables developers to compile and optimize their specific Temporal-Enabled Neural Networks (TENNs) on the Akida Pico. With MetaTF’s support for models created with TensorFlow/Keras and Pytorch, users avoid needing to learn a new machine language framework while rapidly developing and deploying AI applications for the Edge.

Among the benefits of Akida Pico are:

• Ultra-low power standalone NPU core (<1mW)
• Support power islands for minimal standby power
• Industry-standard development environment
• Very Small logic die area
• Optimize overall die size with configurable data buffer and model parameter memory

“Like all of our Edge AI enablement platforms, Akida Pico was developed to further push the limits of AI on-chip compute with low latency and low power required of neural applications,” said Sean Hehir, CEO at BrainChip. “Whether you have limited AI expertise or are an expert at developing AI models and applications, Akida Pico and the Akida Development Platform provides users with the ability to create, train and test the most power and memory efficient temporal-event based neural networks quicker and more reliably.”

BrainChip’s Akida is an event-based compute platform ideal for early detection, low-latency solutions without massive compute resources for robotics, drones, automotive and traditional sense-detect-classify-track solutions. BrainChip provides a range of software, hardware and IP products that can be integrated into existing and future designs, with a roadmap for customers to deploy multi-modal AI models at the edge.