News from Australia

BusinessWire: Renesas, Australian Semiconductor Technology Company Pty Ltd (ASTC), and VLAB Works, a subsidiary of ASTC, announce a joint development of the VLAB/IMP-TASimulator virtual platform (VP) for Renesas’ R-Car V3M, an automotive SoC for ADAS and in-vehicle infotainment systems. The VP simulates image recognition and cognitive IPs in the R-Car V3M SoC and realizes embedded software development using a PC only, which enables the VP to shorten development time as well as improve software quality.

BrainChip Holdings announces that it has shipped its first BrainChip Accelerator card to a major European automobile manufacturer.

As the first commercial implementation of a hardware-accelerated spiking neural network (SNN) system, BrainChip Accelerator will be evaluated for use in ADAS and Autonomous Vehicle applications.

BrainChip Accelerator is said to increase the performance of object recognition provided by BrainChip Studio software and algorithms. The low-power accelerator card can detect, extract and track objects using a proprietary SNN technology. It provides a 7x improvement in images/second/watt, compared to traditional convolutional neural networks accelerated by GPUs.

Bob Beachler, BrainChip’s SVP for Marketing and Business Development, said: “Our spiking neural network provides instantaneous “one-shot” learning, is fast at detecting, extracting and tracking objects, and is very low-power. These are critical attributes for automobile manufacturers processing the large amounts of video required for ADAS and AV applications. We look forward to working with this world-class automobile manufacturer in applying our technology to meet its requirements.”

A few slides from the recent company presentation: