POLYN Technology Announces First Tapeout of NASP Chip

POLYN Technology, a fabless semiconductor company that offers application-specific Neuromorphic Analog Signal Processing (NASP) technology and products, has taped out a first product chip featuring an analog neuromorphic core of a Voice Activity Detection neural network model.

The chip will be used to qualify the NASP platform technology and first customer products while showcasing NASP’s performance and robustness.

POLYN’s NASP technology stands at the forefront of Edge AI and sensor signal AI processing, uniquely enabling cloudless, on-chip AI for various IoT devices and ensuring privacy and sustainability. POLYN facilitates the seamless deployment of edge AI computing across real-time IoT applications, including automotive, consumer electronics, industrial IoT, machine-to-human interfaces, wearables, and more.

NASP technology utilizes analog neurons with only the necessary connections between neurons for inference. This achieves both ultra-low power consumption and latency.

“This is a considerable milestone in NASP chips development toward our mission to bring energy-efficient neuromorphic solutions to market,” said Aleksandr Timofeev, CEO of POLYN. “Our NASP technology platform is one-of-a-kind, and its implementation called for significant engineering ingenuity protected by numerous patents.”

POLYN has designed and implemented a sophisticated neural network compiler and a tailored EDA flow using standard Cadence tools to transform a trained digital neural network model into mathematically equal analog neuromorphic cores. This flow efficiently generates a cohesive neural network layout consisting of thousands of neurons and connections with the resistive weights. The flow can be employed at any semiconductor foundry.

POLYN has seamlessly integrated Cadence^® Virtuoso^® for custom analog design and Innovus™ Implementation System for digital place and route, clock tree synthesis, and timing closure with the POLYN proprietary NASP platform. This allowed POLYN’s engineering team to streamline the chip development process and meet aggressive time-to-market goals.

Timofeev added that POLYN is actively engaged with customers seeking an ultra-low-power solution for voice processing applications. Additionally, there is high interest in sensor data pre-processing implemented in silicon for automotive industry applications.

For more information about POLYN, visit polyn.ai.