Here is the answer from SynSense co-founder/Chairman about a...

Here is the answer from SynSense co-founder/Chairman about a year ago. He mentions BRN but not sure if they sell development kits a year ago. Somebody should update him on Linkedin.

You might have to go to the Telluride Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop or Capo Caccia Cognitive Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop.

Or you can log onto Bainchip's website & buy one. LOL

Kynan Eng

, CEO/chairman of neuromorphic engineering startups

Updated 1 year ago · Author has 605 answers and 3.9M answer views

Are there any neuromorphic silicon chips such as IBM's TrueNorth or Intel's Loihi that consumers can get their hands on right now?

As of mid-2020, the short answer is sort-of. Here are some possibilities:

• SynSense (formerly aiCTX) provides limited quantities of neuromorphic processor development kits to application developers. The technology behind these chips came from the Institute of Neuroinformatics at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich.
• Another company in the space is BrainChip. I don’t know whether or not they are selling development kits.
• The SpiNNaker group at the University of Manchester has distributed limited numbers of their boards for a fee.
• GrAI Matter Labs launched its neuromorphic processor in early 2020 and is now sampling.
• Hailo also has an edge compute device for system developers.

As far as I know, TrueNorth and Loihi are not yet being sold for general R&D, but it is possible to get them if you ask and have good research credentials.

None of these chips is at a usability level where a consumer could try them out. However, they are within reach of competent (and persistent) researchers and engineers. The closest thing to a “consumer” available neuromorphic chip at the moment is the Dynamic Vision Sensor made by companies including Samsung and iniVation. This is a retina-type neuromorphic chip specifically for vision sensing, i.e. not a general-purpose programmable chip processor. Samsung released the first consumer device based on this technology in late 2019 (SmartThings Vision | GP-U999GTEEAAC | AU).

A good way to try these chips is at the Telluride Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop or the Capo Caccia Cognitive Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop. Researchers with the chips often bring them along and invite people to try them out. However, entry to the workshops is selective.

Full disclosure: I am co-founder and former chairman of SynSense, and current CEO at iniVation.