Dolphin Design and Neovision joint forces to make AI processing viable for ambient computing electronics

Las Vegas -- January 5, 2023. Dolphin Design, a leader in silicon IPs for Very Edge Computing embedding AI, integrated power management, and audio IPs, and Neovision, an AI Engineering Consulting company, specializing in Deep Learning & Computer Vision, announced today during CES at Las Vegas that the companies have entered into a strategic partnership that will bring serious AI vision tasks into the sub-mW range, opening a new era of battery-operated consumer applications.

Ambient computing consists of invisible but useful technology stacks that inform and provide actionable information “upstream of demand” without requiring human attention.

Previously, AI solutions relied on AI software optimized separately from the hardware architecture, which hindered the adoption of edge AI. With decentralized data processing closer to the source – especially for battery-powered ambient computing – new opportunities are opening up for AIoT.

The partnership between Dolphin Design and Neovision aims to develop hardware and software co-design approaches to unlock new edge AI robust applications. This strategy enables the demonstration of complex AI vision tasks (like object detection) running battery-operated at sub-mW levels while demonstrating the possibility to be embedded into an SoC (system on chip) with limited amount of memory.

For CES 2023, Dolphin Design & Neovision teamed up to build CamCube, a device-like demonstrator enabling AI-based vision applications at sub-mW level. Scan the QR code to find out more.

The first concrete materialization of the partnership between the companies is a gesture recognition AI application running on a battery-operated camera device demonstrator within sub-mW power budget.

The camera device leverages Dolphin Design’s silicon IP design platforms, in particular Raptor, the company’s ultra-low power Edge AI accelerator IP, and runs Neovision’s high-performance and compact machine learning models.

Philippe Berger, Dolphin Design CEO, said: “We leveraged our decades of ultra-low-power design expertise to build Raptor, our award-winning scalable Neural Processing Unit IP. Raptor is a pure digital and scalable silicon IP. It re-invents energy efficiency through a technology-independent near-memory computing architecture that truly minimizes data movement to save system-level energy in comparison with traditional Edge AI architectures.”

“We co-designed Raptor hardware and its SDK to drastically increase AI computing efficiency for allowing ambient computing to finally take off. Neovision, our partner for Vision AI did the rest.”

Architecting state-of-the-art deep learning models that fit into the extremely constrained SoCs targeting edge applications is a cumbersome effort for most. .

Philippe Berger stresses that “Only an end-to-end approach can help reach sub mW level of power budget with a consumer device as proven by our CamCube demonstrator device-like during CES. This is where our ecosystem comes into play”.

Lucas Nacsa, Neovision CEO, said: “Embedded Artificial Intelligence is changing our world in a radical way. It allows us to face new challenges and opportunities in many fields such as transport, health, industry, smart building, agriculture, environment, security.”

“By analyzing data as close as possible to the sensors that generate it, Embedded AI opens the field to new real time use cases. Moreover, at a time when energy is a precious resource, it reduces its consumption by performing calculations with processors specially designed for it.”

“It is a great pleasure to announce today our collaboration with Dolphin Design. Combining our expertise in neural network design and optimization with their NPU Raptor, we can achieve unmatched performance in terms of energy consumption.”

“We are delighted to partner with Dolphin Design, as we share common values of innovation and excellence.”

About Dolphin Design

DOLPHIN DESIGN, a subsidiary of Soitec, is a fast-growing IP provider and Turnkey Design Service company. Their unique know-how in optimizing energy efficiency earned Dolphin Design the honor of being one of the 1,000 companies worldwide to receive the Solar Impulse label. Dolphin Design enables companies to realize their vision in different verticals such as edge IoT, AIoT, multimedia, AI and 5G, or automotive and aerospace markets wherever energy efficiency and/or low power consumption is a necessity.

Our mantra to our customers is simple: “Tell us your biggest dream. Dare the impossible. We make it happen”.

For more information, please visit https://www.dolphin-design.fr/

About Neovision

NEOVISION is an AI Engineering Consulting company that specializes in machine learning and deep learning, specifically in the area of computer vision. The company offers services such as consulting and personalized support to help its customers integrate AI applications into their businesses. Neovision’s team of proficient engineers and doctors work together to create turnkey solutions that are tailored to the unique needs of each customer.

In order to provide its customers with high-performance, state-of-the-art innovations, Neovision constantly monitors the latest scientific developments and invests in R&D on promising topics. This allows the company to stay at the forefront of the field and offer its customers the latest and greatest in AI technology.

For more information, please visit https://www.neovision.fr