Haha! What's this? Surely not!? Evan, who claims to be from Woodside, has left a question on Huawei's blog! You know, Huawei, potentially the unnamed large cell phone manufacturer in China that BrainChip have been in discussion with.
EVAN TAREHA (November 21, 2018 at 8:59 am): "Evan from Woodside. Sound’s exciting, It is said Brainchip are streets ahead in development with spiking neuromorphic network.What’s your thoughts?"
Unfortunately, that awkward question by Evan from Woodside never gets answered...
"There was a follow up question because I did mention last time that we had an inbound from a large cell phone manufacturer. I would just remind you that it's a cell phone manufacturer in China. They have their own semiconductor group, so yes, it's a very active dialogue and we're getting to know each other, but we're being very cautious as that relates to question on the next piece of paper, which is protecting our IP. Large cell phone manufacturer, China with their own semiconductor business."
"Intellectual property is an interesting arena as well for the purpose of time to money and some very large opportunities. When you think about going to the edge, IoT devices think about surveillance cameras, even cell phones. Cell phones I would consider an edge device. You're not going to sell an Akida chip in all likelihood into a cell phone. If you rip your cell phone apart you're going find three or four ICs in there, very large scale integration. Most of the major cell phone manufacturers, think about Apple, Samsung, Huawei, all of them do some in-house development of their own chips or they use outside resources to develop custom chips. They would like to put IP such as Akida into one of their custom chips. So we have early discussions going on with a major cell phone manufacturer. It's actually been quite a number of meetings, a meeting at their facility, a meeting at our facility developing a statement of work to define what it is that they would like out of Akida as an IP lock integrated into one of their very large scale system wide chips."
"Currently we're supporting about 21 committed or active trials. Many people are going into trial or they're in the midst of a trial. A trial period can be anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months. Once the trial is complete, then people come back with positive results, which is what we've seen time and time again. Then you go through the process of winning the design. Once you have the design win as I said conversion could take sometime. It is awkward that most of what we do is under non-disclosure. The first line in most of the non-disclosure agreements is the very nature of having a non-disclosure agreement should not be disclosed with a customer name. It's a little bit difficult.
You know law enforcement agencies don't want the general public knowing that they're putting systems such as this in place. When you talk to automobile manufacturers, they don't want their competitors to know what kinds of technologies they're evaluating. When we talk to cellphone manufacturers, it gets strikingly even more robust with respect to non-disclosure. If you think about the top three cellphone manufacturers in the world, you've got Apple, Huawei and Samsung, none of those companies would like the other two to know what technologies they're evaluating."
"Consumers heavily driven by cellphones. I don't know what it is now, it's got to be a billion and a half or more cellphones every year, probably significantly more than that. Cellphones is an interesting business. Frankly it can be very quick time to large revenue. It does take a lot of research and development. It takes a lot of engineering I should say to stay in. Once you win in a cellphone, the cellphone goes to market very quickly, all of the majors are introducing four or five models each year, but you've got to re-win it in the next year.
Fortunately for us, the contact that we've had in the cellphone space is not to buy an Akida chip. If you tear open your cellphone you're only going to find three or four ICs or integrated circuits in your cellphone. Each of the majors and again you can think about everyone from Apple, to Huawei, Samsung, ZTE, all of them have their own internal IC development capability and they build their own applications processors in many cases. What they would look to us for is the Akida IP block.
You basically sell your design the IP block only those pieces that they need when we look at the architectural design of Akida, they wouldn't need a lot of the things that are on there. They'd need neuron fabric, they need the data to spike converter for whatever the specific use case is, but they would then take that design and they would incorporate it in their own silicon, their own processor that they're building.
Very nice part about this is it could lead to revenue for Akida long before we even have our own IC. If you intersect with one of these companies and you have a compelling case, smaller footprint meaning less dye area, consumed with a spiking neural network rather than what they may be do with a convolutional neural network now, much lower power. Again increasing battery life basically when you think about power it's all about battery life.
If you've got a compelling set of features and benefits, you can end up inside their silicon and that could very well if you intersect at the right time happen well in advance of us having our own Akida chip for edged devices or ganged on a PCI card for enterprise applications."
(20min delay)