POLYN Technology Shows Off "Tiny AI" NASP Test Chip, Promises Mass Production by 2023
Built on a 55nm CMOS process, the first NASP test chip will be followed by a NASP-equipped sports wearable in Q1 2023, POLYN claims.
Fabless semiconductor firm POLYN Technology has announced the creation of what it claims to be the "first Tiny AI true analog design" for deployment right alongside sensors at the edge, based on the company's brain-mimicking Neuromorphic Analog Signal Processing (NASP) architecture — and the test chip itself is designed by artificial intelligence.
"This achievement validates the intensive work of our multinational team," claims Aleksandr Timofeev, chief executive and founder of POLYN Technology. "Our chip represents the most advanced technology bridging analog computations and the digital core. It is designed with neuroscience in mind, replicating pre-processing the primary cortical area of the human brain makes at the periphery before learning at the center."
The test chip, built on a 55nm CMOS process, serves as proof of two of the company's approaches. The first is its Neuromorphic Analog Signal Processing (NASP) architecture, designed to mimic how the human brain operates to bring edge AI capabilities at a very low power draw — down to 100µW, the company claims, despite providing twice the accuracy traditional approaches.
The second is an approach to chip design which relies upon the very neural networks the part is designed to accelerate, instead of laborious manual chip layout. "Our first chip is created from trained neural networks by [the] NASP compiler and synthesis tools that generated [a] netlist and the silicon engineering files from the software math model simulation," explains POLYN's chief operating officer Yaakov Milstain of the process. "We will continue to refine our technology for creation of new generation chips."
The test chip, the precise specifications of which the company has not shared beyond the claim it "contains several neural network [processors]," will be followed by mass production in the first quarter of 2023, POLYN promises, as part of the company's first wearable product alongside photoplethysmography (PPG) heart-rate and inertial measurement unit (IMU) motion sensors.
More on the company's NASP technology is available on the company website.