Frontgrade Gaisler licenses Akida neural processor IP

Rad-hard processor vendor Frontgrade Gaisler (Göteborg, Sweden) has taken a commercial license for the Akida neural processor IP from BrainChip Holdings Ltd. (Laguna Hills, Calif.).

Frontgrade Gaisler will incorporate the IP into space-grade, fault-tolerant hardware accelerator chips, BrainChip said.

The companies did not indicate how quickly the integration would take place or when Frontgrade Gaisler would be able to offer the capability. Nor did the company say whether Akida would be added to both Gaisler’s SPARC and RISC-V product lines or just one. Gaisler offers processors and systems-on-chip (SoC) based on the SPARC architecture (Leon) and on the RISC-V architecture (Noel).

The second generation of Akida platform allows the processing of time-continuous streaming data, including video analytics, target tracking, audio classification, health monitoring data, and time series analytics. This is done while maintaining compatibility with existing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), BrainChip said.

“While many fields no doubt can benefit from neuromorphic computing, one essential area is computer vision applications where current FPGA or GPU technology does not bring satisfactory results for edge deployments when considering mass, volume and power constraints,” said Laurent Hili, microelectronics and data handling engineer at the European Space Agency.