BrainChip Holdings Ltd. announced the Early Access availability of its second-generation Akida? IP solution for use in a wide range of applications across the Smart Home, Smart City, Industrial and Automotive markets. The 2nd generation Akida platform is designed for extremely energy-efficient processing of complex neural network models on Edge devices.

The support for 8-bit weights, activations, and long-range skip connections expands the reach of models that are accelerated completely in Akida?s hardware. With the exponential increase in Cloud compute requirements for AI compounded by the growth of Generative AI, the move towards Hybrid AI solutions needs more capable and efficient compute at the Edge. The introduction of Temporal Event Based Neural Nets (TENNs) revolutionizes the advanced sequential processing for multi-dimensional streaming and time-series data.

This can radically reduce model size and improve performance, as well as efficiency, without compromising accuracy, which is an important consideration for Edge devices. Reducing the model size and improving compute density by order of magnitude, allows more capable AI use cases to compute closer to sensor in a more secure fashion. Combining this with hardware acceleration of Vision Transformers (ViT) models, which boosts vision performance, unlocks the potential to create game-changing Edge devices that can process advanced vision and video applications in milliwatts or audio and other similar applications in microwatts at the sensor.

The second generation MetaTF software enables developers to evaluate the capabilities of Akida, optimize, and customize their designs to get a head start on architecting their System on a Chip (SoC) along with their software solutions. In addition to TensorFlow, MetaTF will support ONNX which allows for greater compatibility across various frameworks including PyTorch. Akida processors power the next generation of Edge AI devices that enable growth in intelligence in industrial, home, automotive and other IoT environments.

Akida?s fully digital, customizable, event-based neural processing solution is ideal for advanced intelligent sensing, medical monitoring and prediction, high-end video-object detection and more. Along with its extreme efficiency, accuracy and performance, Akida also has a unique ability to securely learn on-device without the need for cloud retraining.