BrainChip Introduces Akida™ Pico, The Lowest-Power AI Acceleration Co-Processor

• BrainChip Holdings Ltd (ASX: BRN, OTCQX: BRCHF, ADR: BCHPY) is the world’s first commercial producer of ultra-low power, fully digital, event-based, brain-inspired AI. 
• Akida™ Pico is the lowest power acceleration co-processor, introduced by BrainChip, to enable 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 personalisation 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.

According to Sean Hehir, CEO at BrainChip:

“Like all of our Edge AI enablement platforms, Akida Pico was developed to further push the limits of AI on-chip computing with low latency and low power required of neural applications. Whether you have limited AI expertise or are an expert at developing AI models and applications, Akida Pico and the Akida Development Platform provide 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 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.

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. The platform efficiently accelerates vision, multi-sensory and spatio-temporal applications, critically needed in industrial, automotive, digital health, smart home, and smart city applications.

Akida™ Pico by BrainChip 

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 optimise 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
• Optimise overall die size with configurable data buffer and model parameter memory

About BrainChip Holdings Ltd (ASX: BRN, OTCQX: BRCHF, ADR: BCHPY)

BrainChip is the worldwide leader in Edge AI on-chip processing and learning. The company’s first-to-market, fully digital, event-based AI processor, Akida^TM, uses principles that mimic the human brain, analysing only essential sensor inputs at the point of acquisition, processing data with unparalleled efficiency, precision, and economy of energy. 

Akida uniquely enables Edge learning local to the chip, independent of the cloud, dramatically reducing latency while improving privacy and data security. Akida Neural processor IP, which can be integrated into SoCs on any process technology, has shown substantial benefits on today’s workloads and networks, and offers a platform for developers to create, tune and run their models using standard AI workflows like Tensorflow/Keras.

 In enabling effective Edge computing to be universally deployable across real-world applications such as connected cars, consumer electronics, and industrial IoT, BrainChip is proving that on-chip AI, close to the sensor, is the future, for its customers’ products, as well as the planet.