Volkswagen Group Research is looking into the use of spiking neural network hardware architecture. I've only uploaded several slides, but the link to the full presentation is below:
This reminded me that Louis DiNardo has informed us that "research guys like to do research" and that the "first goal is to get out of the research lab with the automobile manufacturers".
Oh and don't forget, "The end game in the automotive industry is Akida".
"I want to separate a bit applications from market places. Applications in the automotive industry will go to automobile manufacturers, it will be major automobile manufacturers around the world. I can't discuss who it is that we're engaged with, but the advanced driver assisted systems as well as the advanced, the autonomous vehicle developments, they're going on everywhere from GM, Ford, Renault, Volkswagen. I could give you a list of 10 or 15 automobile manufacturers that are focused on this area. For us it's primarily at this juncture ADAS.
Level two, three and four where you're building in lidar, radar, ultrasound, putting transducers in the bumpers, putting cameras and looking at the driver to make sure people aren't falling asleep. Making sure that you don't have drunk drivers on the road, advanced systems where hand gestures, interaction voice recognition will be features that come out in the near future from automobile manufacturers. That's not to discount at all that the automobile manufactures look to third parties for specific modules. When you look at a transducer in a bumper and again it could be lidar, it could be ultrasound, it could radar, in may cases they go to third party vendors. These are not small vendors, these are major league companies.
In France, you have a company called Valeo, in the US you have Continental. It's not continental the car, it's Continental the vendor. There was a company called Delphi which I think has recently, I don't know recently, but has renamed itself I believe Aptive. These are multi-billion dollar corporations that supply transducer modules and other modules under the hood for engine control systems, telematics in our case it would be sensors for autonomous vehicles or A desk levels two, three and four.
We have engagements in both categories, engagements meaning we've got open dialogue in the automobile manufacturing arena. The primary goal, our first goal is to get out of the research lab with the automobile manufacturers and get a project. Frankly that can be a long course, the research guys like to do research. We find it to be a faster path with the third party vendors, they move much more quickly. They're willing to define specific use cases, scope of work and look very closely to move a project along very quickly in order to support their automobile manufacturers. In both cases we've got active engagements.
Again, I need to hearken back to, we put the announcement out that we had shipped accelerator car to a major European automobile manufacturer. Let's recognise that BrainChip Studio and the accelerator for BrainChip Studio is not the end game in the automotive industry. The end game in the automotive industry is Akida. Akida is a low powered device that can be embedded with a transducer. I'll go through a little bit more of why that's important in a moment, but the effort to understand our technology, play with BrainChip Studio, watch it work on an accelerator card. That was really a preamble to us now showing the automobile manufacturers as well as the third party vendors the real power of Akida as an edge device. In a car you've got things at the edge where the transistors are and then you've got things that are still going to be run by GPUs and CPUs as the central processor or the data centre within the car."
BRN Price at posting:
8.8¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)