Diederik Verkest

Hoe nieuwe hardware het stroomverbruik van artificiële intelligentie kan reduceren

Artificiële intelligentie steunt op het verwerken van grote hoeveelheden data en dat kost veel energie. Een nieuwe chip, waarbij deze berekeningen door middel van analoge technologie rechtstreeks in het geheugen worden uitgevoerd, kan dat energieverbruik drastisch reduceren.

Bringing AI to the edge

There are use cases where patterns should be recognized instantaneously, such as with radars that need to detect people or vehicles in the path of a self-driving vehicle. There, the time delay of a round-trip to the cloud is simply prohibitive.

Bringing artificial intelligence to the edge of the IoT

Today AI is successfully used to recognize faces and traffic signs, diagnose diseases and advance remedies, predict rainfall and consumer preferences, and much more. But doing so requires powerful, energy-guzzling processors. These sit at the heart of the cloud and require sensor data to be transferred all the way from where they are generated. Which is often prohibitive. The solution? Bring AI to the sensors at the edge of the Internet of Things (IoT). To do so, explains Diederik Verkest, distinguished member of technical staff at imec, our researchers are working on a pipeline of innovative hardware that instead of hundreds of watts consume less than a watt, or even mere milliwatts.

Vision: Optimizing technology for IoT systems – adding fingerprints and brains