The world’s largest smartphone chipmaker, Qualcomm, says it wants to start helping partners manufacture a radically different kind of a chip—a neuro-inspired chip that mimics the neural structures and processing methods found in the brain. This approach could enable machines to perform complex tasks while consuming far less power.
Speaking in a sponsored talk at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference, Qualcomm plans to, by next year, take on partners to design and manufacture such chips for applications ranging from artificial vision sensors to robot controllers and even brain implants.
Today’s computer systems are built with separate units for storing information and processing it sequentially. But, brainlike architectures process information in a distributed, parallel way, modeled after how the neurons and synapses work in a brain.
Qualcomm has already developed new software tools that simulate activity in the brain. These networks, which model the way individual neurons convey information through precisely timed spikes, allow developers to write and compile biologically inspired programs. Qualcomm is using this approach to build a class of processors called neural processing units (NPUs). It envisions NPUs that are massively parallel, reprogrammable, and capable of cognitive tasks like classification and prediction.
The company has built prototypes of a neuro-inspired chip for a rolling robot in its labs in San Diego. Simply telling the robot when it has arrived in the right spot allows it to figure out how to get there later without any complex set of commands.
By next year the company plans to partner with researchers and startups, offering them a platform to realize designs in hardware.
