By Li Panpan
Leading-edge neuromorphic computing company SynSense(时识科技) will team up with BMW to combine neuromorphic chips in its smart cockpits. They will work on SynSense’s Speck, the world’s first fully event-driven smart vision sensor, announced the company based in Chengdu of southwestern Sichuan Province with origin in Switzerland.
SynSense (formerly aiCTX) was established in 2017 in Switzerland with over 20 years of background at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich. It moved its headquarters to China in 2020 with clearer market-oriented plans.
The March 31 announcement said that SynSense would cooperate with BMW to promote the deep integration of neuromorphic chips and smart cockpits, with ultra-low power consumption, ultra-low latency, and privacy protection.
Image source: SynSense
Qiao Ning, founder and CEO of SynSense, said that SynSense would explore solutions to improve driving safety to meet different application needs in the automotive field.
“Applying neuromorphic techniques to vision applications represents a large market opportunity in many sectors. A report by Yole Développement forecasts that neuromorphic computing and sensing will represent between 15% and 20% of total AI computing revenue in 2035, about a roughly $20B market,” added Qiao.
SynSense will explore in-vehicle intelligent applications inside and outside the car with the focus of Speck, a smart vision sensor based on neuromorphic technology and computing.
Speck is the world’s first fully event-driven smart vision sensor. Its contribution to AI innovation lies in its traits of ultra-low power consumption, ultra-low latency, and real-time processing: the peak power consumption of Speck is less than one mW, and the end-to-end delay is less than 30 mS, meaning it can be always-on and process real-time sensor data, like recognizing faces, gestures, postures, with applications in Smart Home, Smart Surveillance, Robotics, Industrial IoT. It is also the world’s first smart vision SoC that integrates neuromorphic technology and computing, according to SynSense.
BMW said, “We look forward to the new future driving experience brought by neuromorphic intelligence.”
