Vsora Unveils AI Chip Family to Enable L2-L5 Autonomous Driving

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Vsora has just raised $4.2 million in a pre-Series B round of financing to accelerate the development of its Tyr chip family.

www.eetimes.eu/, Jan. 18, 2023 – 

Paris-based digital-signal–processing (DSP) IP startup Vsora has introduced a family of PetaFLOPS computational companion chips to accelerate Level 3 (L3) through Level 5 (L5) autonomous-vehicle (AV) designs. Vsora has just raised $4.2 million in a pre-Series B round of financing to hasten its development.

The Tyr chip family uses Vsora's AD1028 architecture, which combines DSP and deep-learning-accelerator (DLA) units. Tyr is claimed to deliver between 258 trillion and 1,032 trillion operations per second (TOPS) and to consume 10 W.

"In January 2022, we introduced a family of scalable algorithmic accelerator designs based on our Vsora architecture that combines AI in the form of DLA with DSP exchanging data via on-chip memory," Khaled Maalej, CEO of Vsora, told EE Times Europe. "The combination of AI with DSP is necessary to address Level 4 and Level 5 autonomous driving [AD]. The accelerators, fully programmable in real time in the field, are deployed as companion chips to the main processor, making them relevant to a range of applications, not limited to AD."

The Tyr family is now composed of three chips: Tyr1, Tyr2 and Tyr3. Maalej said the difference lies in the absolute compute power provided. "This is due to the number of AI and DSP elements encompassed in the respective chip. The larger the number, the more processing power with moderate increase in power consumption, but virtually the same utilization factor and the same latency."

The silicon is underway, and Vsora is working with partners to roll out the commercial products. It expects to complete an additional round of financing toward the end of the process.

When asked if Vsora is already working on Tyr4 and Tyr5, Maalej said, the architecture is scalable. However, "the algorithm development is happening very fast, so we are always looking to ensure that our solutions are future-proof. Fewer and fewer of today's suppliers are able to handle the new, advanced algorithms. We are one of the few, and we are very focused on remaining so."

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