PITTSBURGH — February 15, 2022
Aspinity, the pioneer in analog machine learning chips, today launched the first member of its AnalogML family, the AML100, which is the industry's first and only tiny machine learning (ML) solution operating completely within the analog domain. As such, the AML100 reduces always-on system power by 95%, allowing manufacturers to dramatically extend the battery life of today's devices or migrate wall-powered always-on devices to battery — opening whole new classes of products for voice-first systems, home and commercial security, predictive and preventative maintenance, and biomedical monitoring.
Minimizing the quantity and movement of data through a system is one of the most efficient ways to reduce power consumption, but today's always-on devices don't have that capability. Instead, they continuously collect large amounts of natively analog data as they monitor their environment and digitize the data immediately, wasting tremendous system power processing data that are mostly irrelevant to the application.
In contrast, the AML100 delivers substantial system-level power savings by moving the ML workload to ultra-low-power analog, where it can determine data relevancy with a high degree of accuracy and at near-zero power. This makes the AML100 the only tinyML chip that intelligently reduces data at the sensor while the data is still analog, keeping the digital components in low-power mode until important data is detected — eliminating the power penalty of digitization, digital processing, and transmission of irrelevant data.
“We've long realized that reducing the power of each individual chip within an always-on system provides only incremental improvements to battery life,” said Tom Doyle, founder and CEO of Aspinity. “That's not good enough for manufacturers who need revolutionary power improvements. The AML100 reduces always-on system power to under 100µA, and that unlocks the potential of thousands of new kinds of applications running on battery.”
The heart of the AML100 is an array of independent, configurable analog blocks (CABs) that are fully programmable in software to support a wide range of functions, including sensor interfacing and ML. The chip can be reprogrammed in the field with software updates or new algorithms targeting other always-on applications. Its precise programmability also eliminates the chip-to-chip performance inconsistencies typical of standard analog CMOS process variation.
About Aspinity — Aspinity is the world leader in the design and development of analog processing chips that enable near-zero power AI systems. Aspinity's analog computing technology brings the versatility, performance, and consistency of digital neural processing into the lower-power analog domain to achieve the efficiency required for sophisticated AI at the edge.
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