Engineers at the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM) announced they have developed an artificial intelligence-powered chip that can perform complicated operations like voice, face and gesture recognition, and cardiac monitoring, which can run on solar energy.
This technology can eliminate artificial intelligence’s mandatory requirement of staying continuously connected to the cloud. This technology performs all artificial intelligence operations locally on the chipset rather than on the cloud. It is a customizable system that can be modified according to the requirements of any application, which requires real-time signal and image processing.
The technology will be unveiled at the 2021 VLSI Circuits Symposium in Kyoto this month. The technology works through an entirely new signal processing architecture that reduces the power consumption of the chip. It has an ASIC chip and a RISC-V processor, which also has been developed by CSEM. The technology will also have two coupled machine learning accelerators. The first machine learning accelerator is a binary decision tree (BDT) engine that can carry out simple tasks but cannot perform facial-voice-gesture recognition operations.
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The second accelerator is a convolutional neural network (CNN) engine capable of performing complicated recognition operations efficiently. This unique approach reduces the power consumption drastically as the first accelerator does most of the job. Stephane Emery, Head researcher at CSEM, said, “When our system for example is used in facial recognition applications, the first accelerator will answer preliminary questions like are there people in the images? And if so, are their faces visible?”
This groundbreaking invention can revolutionize the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning as the chips developed by CSEM can run independently for more than one year. Additionally, it considerably reduces the maintenance and installation cost of such devices and enables the usage of them at locations where it is difficult to find a power source.
