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AUSTRALIAN resources exploration firm Aziana is planning to acquire BrainChip, an artificial intelligence R&D company.
BrainChip is based in California in the US, and its key technology developed by inventor Peter van der Made is a piece of hardware called Spiking Neuron Adaptive Processor (SNAP), an AI that reportedly replicates the neural behaviour of the human brain to learn autonomously, evolve, and associate information. It achieves learning via feedback through intensity and repetition, learning from usage patterns and evolving through experience.
This technology has been in development for 10 years and is said to be endorsed by world leading neuroscientists. It was patented in the U.S. and Australia in 2008, and is said to be 5000 times faster, with 1/1000 the power consumption of the world’s fastest computers performing neural computing today.
According to Aziana, Peter van der Made invented one of the earliest high resolution colour graphics accelerator chips for the IBM personal computer, as well as a computer security technology that was acquired by IBM in 2003 (Electronics News has been unable to verify these claims via independent sources).
BrainChip’s technology is a hardware-only solution, based on a parallel network of ASIC chips optimised for the learning AI application. This allows high speed computation with very low power consumption compared to software-based solutions that are slowed by the need to sequentially step through complex programs that require significant computing resources and time to generate the solutions.
BrainChip is currently hoping to commercialise SNAP technology by targeting implementation in smartphones. The speed and low power consumption would allow the AI technology to be implemented in mobile devices, enabling technology such as voice signature identification.
The company also hopes to license SNAP technology out to players in the Internet of Things and the neural cognitive computing industries.