BrainChip Holdings Ltd, the world’s first commercial producer of ultra-low power, fully digital, event-based, neuromorphic AI, announced that it was awarded a development contract for $1.8M from Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) on neuromorphic radar signaling processing technologies.
The AFRL contract award, under the topic number AF242-D015, is titled “Mapping Complex Sensor Signal Processing Algorithms onto Neuromorphic Chips”. The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract is a development effort expansion after a successful demonstration of radar processing algorithms running on BrainChip’s Akida™ commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) neuromorphic hardware. The signal processing algorithms encompass the processing of RF signals to decode communication and radar waveforms from raw in-phase and quadrature data.
BrainChip’s Akida processor is a revolutionary computing architecture that processes neural networks and machine learning algorithms at ultra-low power consumption, making it ideal for edge computing applications. The company’s neuromorphic technology improves the cognitive communication capabilities on size, weight and power & cost (SWaP-C) constrained platforms such as military, spacecraft and robotics for commercial and government markets.
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Neuromorphic hardware represents a low-power solution for edge AI processing, consuming significantly less energy than traditional computing hardware for signal processing and identification using artificial intelligence. This project intends to validate a new capability to embed sophisticated radar processing solutions in SWaP-C constrained radar platforms utilized in a wide variety of systems, including threat detection, air defense and guidance use cases in stationery and more importantly in mobile platforms such as drones, robots, aircraft, satellites and projectile based defense systems that have severe SWaP-C constraints.
“Radar signaling processing will be implemented on multiple airborne and mobile platforms, so minimizing system SWaP-C is critical,” said Sean Hehir, CEO of BrainChip. “The contract to improve radar signaling applications for Air Force Research Laboratory highlights how neuromorphic computing can achieve significant benefits of low-power, high-performance compute in the most mission-critical use cases. This award is a very strong endorsement from leading organizations such as AFRL for our groundbreaking Akida hardware and state-space AI models using Temporal Enabled Neural Network (TENNs) model offerings.”
BrainChip is the worldwide leader in Edge AI on-chip processing and learning. The company’s first-to-market, fully digital, event-based AI processor, Akida™, uses neuromorphic principles to mimic the human brain, analyzing only essential sensor inputs at the point of acquisition, processing data with unparalleled efficiency, precision, and economy of energy. Akida uniquely enables Edge learning within the chip, independent of the cloud, dramatically reducing latency while improving privacy and data security.
SOURCE: Businesswire