Not me. Wonder who wrote that FF This was for AKIDA 1
In a coffee shop recently, I heard a person say that something was only the size of a SIM card.
However, yesterday while listening to a BAE Systems sponsored podcast entitled ‘Advancing Cognitive Warfare: Unveiling Neuromorphic Frontiers’, I heard Dr. Joseph Guerci, an internationally recognised leader in research and development of next generation sensor and cognitive systems, use the term ‘postage stamp’ three times to emphasise the size of the AKD1000 neuromorphic chip.
In opining that Akida was the most exciting development of our time, even more important than ChatGPT, Dr Guerci explained
“…the whole point of a neural network is the weighting that goes onto the interconnects from layer to layer. And the interesting thing about that is you’ve got companies like BrainChip in Australia… that is not by any stretch using the most sophisticated foundry to achieve ridiculous line lists like conventional FPGAs and GPUs do …instead it’s just a different architecture.
But why is that such a big deal?
Well, in the case of BrainChip as well as Intel and IBM, these chips can be the size of a postage stamp.
And because they’re implementing what are called spiking neural networks, or SNNs, they only draw power when there’s a change of state, and that’s a very short amount of time, and it’s relatively low-power.
So at the end of the day, you have something the size of a postage stamp that’s implementing a very, very sophisticated convolution…
This is the thing that changes everything
So now you see this little UAV coming in, and you don’t think for a second that it could do, you know, the most sophisticated electronic warfare functions, for example pulse sorting, feature identification, geolocation, all these things that require, you know, thousands of lines of code and lots of high-speed embedded computing, all of a sudden it’s done on a postage stamp.
That’s the crazy thing.
And by the way, in my research we’ve done it, we’ve implemented pulse, the interleaving, we’ve implemented, you know, ATR, specifically on the BrainChip from Australia…”
So, there you have it, the first adhesive postage stamp, the “Penny Black”, was circulated on 6 May 1840 — over 180 years ago[1]. It conquered the world and became a measure of size in common speech. Despite this it was destined for obscurity because of the Internet’s success but now it may well have been rescued by Dr. Guerci using ‘postage stamp’ to describe the proportions of the next game changing technology, the Brainchip AKD1000 to his listeners.
For those who have never seen the AKD1000, the first engineering samples in 2020 came in at approximately 18mm x 18mm, while the first the Penny Black came in at approximately 19mm x 20mm.
Dr. Guerci was spot on in his description of AKD1000 as being the size of a postage stamp. I personally hope it sticks.
The first One Penny Black is now one of the most valuable postage stamps in the world with a multi-million-dollar price tag[2], which if Dr. Guerci is correct, the first $25.00 Akida chip may well become just as valuable.
It should not be thought however that Dr. Guerci is the only one impressed with BrainChip’s Akida technology. Late last year six researchers from Ericsson published a paper which revealed that they had used Akida to build a first of its kind prototype Zero Energy device[3]. Sadly, they did not use the term postage stamp in their description. Perhaps that will now change.
Lastly, I will leave you with some other great and more recent use cases of BrainChip’s Akida:
(20min delay)