Europe spends €3 million in neuromorphic R&D around SynSense
CEA-Leti has announced an EU project to develop algorithms and electronic devices and circuits to form analog spiking processors that mimic biological neural systems.
The project reportedly began in January 2020 with a team that included researchers from Leti, IMEC, IBM Zurich and the China-backed Swiss startup SynSense AG (see Swiss neuromorphic startup changes name, raises money).
The official title of the 42-month project is ‘Memory technologies with multi-scale time constants for neuromorphic architectures’shortened to MeM-Scales. The project is 100 percent funded by European Union tax payers to the amount of €3,950,628 and 75 eurocents according to the Horizon2020 project page here. Under the contract SynSense receives €200,000.
The plan is for MeM-Scales to build novel memory and device technologies and autonomous learning algorithms to support on-chip learning for both synapses and neurons. This would be done with a view to merging biological and electronic sensing and computation in such applications as distributed environmental monitoring, implantable medical diagnostic microchips, wearable electronics and human-computer interaction.
The results will be used to build neuromorphic computing systems that can process efficiently real-world sensory signals and natural time-series data in real-time and to demonstrate this with a practical laboratory prototype. This will enable low-power and always-on IoT and edge-computing computing processing systems for applications do not need to, or cannot afford to, connect to the cloud.
About SynSense
SynSense is a leading-edge neuromorphic computing company. It provides dedicated mixed-signal neuromorphic processors which overcome the limitations of legacy von Neumann computers to provide an unprecedented combination of ultra-low power consumption and low-latency performance. SynSense has a unique technological edge and IP portfolio that comes from over 20 years of experience in mixed-signal neural processor design, advanced neural routing architectures, and neural algorithms.
To learn more about SynSense, please visit: www.synsense.ai
About Prophesee
Prophesee is the inventor of the world’s most advanced neuromorphic vision systems.
The company developed a breakthrough Event-Based Vision approach to machine vision. This new vision category allows for significant reductions of power, latency and data processing requirements to reveal what was invisible to traditional frame-based sensors until now. Prophesee’s patented Metavision® sensors and algorithms mimic how the human eye and brain work to dramatically improve efficiency in areas such as autonomous vehicles, industrial automation, IoT, mobile and AR/VR. Prophesee is based in Paris, with local offices in Grenoble, Shanghai, Tokyo and Silicon Valley.
The company is driven by a team of more than 100 visionary engineers, holds more than 50 international patents and is backed by leading international equity and corporate investors including 360 Capital Partners, European Investment Bank, iBionext, Inno-Chip, Intel Capital, Renault Group, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Sinovation, Supernova Invest, Xiaomi.
