Renesas tapes out spiking neural network chip

Renesas is taping out a chip using the spiking neural network (SNN) technology developed by Brainchip.

By Nick Flaherty, eeNews Europe (December 2, 2022)

This is part of a move to boost the leading edge performance of its chips for the Internet of Things, Sailesh Chittipeddi became Executive Vice President and General Manager of IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit at Renesas Electronics and the former CEO of IDT tells eeNews Europe.

This strategy has seen the company develop the first silicon for ARM’s M85 and RISC-V cores, along with new capacity and foundry deals.

“We are very happy to be at the leading edge and now we have made a rapid transition to address our ARM shortfall but we realise the challenges in the marketplace and introduced the RISC-V products to make sure we don’t fall behind in the new architectures,” he said.

“Our next move is to more advanced technology nodes to push the microcontrollers into the gigahertz regime and that’s where the is overlap with microprocessors. The way I look at it is all about the system performance.”

“Now you have accelerators for driving AI with neural processing units rather than a dual core CPU. We are working with a third party taping out a device in December on 22nm CMOS,” said Chittipeddi.

Brainchip and Renesas signed a deal in December 2020 to implement the spiking neural network technology. Tools are vital for this new area. “The partner gives us the training tools that are needed,” he said.

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