Highly scalable performance for classic and generative on-device and edge AI solutions

The Cadence Neo NPUs offer energy-efficient hardware-based AI engines that can be paired with any host processor for offloading artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) processing. The Neo NPUs target a wide variety of applications, including sensor, audio, voice/speech, vision, radar, and more. The comprehensive performance range makes the Neo NPUs well-suited for ultra-power-sensitive applications such as IoT, hearables/wearables, high-performance systems in AR/VR, automotive, and more.

The product architecture natively supports the processing required for many network topologies and operators, allowing for a complete or near-complete offload from the host processor. Depending on the application s needs, the host processor can be an application processor, a general-purpose MCU, or a DSP for pre-/post-processing and associated signal processing, with the inferencing managed by the NPU.

The Neo NPUs provide performance scalability from 256 up to 32k 8x8-bit MAC per cycle with a single core, suiting an extensive range of processing needs. Capacity configurations are available in power-2 increments, allowing for the right sizing in an SoC for the target applications. Int4, Int8, Int16, and FP16 are all natively supported data types, with mixed precision supported by the hardware and associated software tools, allowing for the best performance and accuracy tradeoffs.

Additional features of the Neo NPUs include compression/decompression to minimize system memory space and bandwidth consumption for a network and energy-optimized compute hardware to leverage network sparsity tradeoffs.

The Neo NPUs support typical clock frequencies of up to 1.25GHz in 7nm, and customers can target lower clock frequencies for specific product needs.