30th Jan 2018 - NetSpeed Systems, Inc. today announced that Horizon Robotics has licensed NetSpeed Orion and Gemini Interconnect IP for use in its industry-leading artificial intelligence (AI) chips for embedded AI applications such as autonomous driving and smart cameras.

AI applications rely on extensive computing resources to emulate human intelligence and decision-making capability. IBM's Watson platform, for example, utilizes vast cloud computing resources to address AI applications in healthcare, education, finance, transportation and energy. At the consumer level, smart assistants like Alexa and Siri still must rely on cloud resources to answer even simple questions. Horizon Robotics has developed chip technology that eliminates the dependency on the cloud and can bring AI to billions of smart devices at the edge of the Internet. Its chip technology provides capability for perception, understanding, and decision-making to all kinds of devices creating the "brains" necessary to enhance safety, convenience or fun.

"The chip industry is at an inflection point and is starting to embed AI capability in very meaningful and commercially viable ways," said Sundari Mitra, CEO of NetSpeed. "Horizon Robotics represents the next generation of device intelligence providing integrated and open embedded AI solutions with high performance, low power and low cost. We are very excited that NetSpeed's interconnect IP will provide a key part of these solutions."

Horizon Robotics started out in 2015 with the mission to define “the brain of things.” Today the company is building platforms that allow manufacturers to embed AI to empower many types of things.

“Our chip technology needs to be very flexible and scalable to accommodate a vast range of power, performance and area requirements,” said Dr. Yu Kai, founder and CEO of Horizon Robotics. “NetSpeed's interconnect IP enables us to rapidly adapt our platform to meet the specific requirements of a wide variety of embedded AI applications. We chose NetSpeed’s technology because of its higher performance, full coherency support, configurability, and scalability. We believe NetSpeed IP is a great on-chip network solution that fully addresses the needs of next-generation SoCs targeting AI applications.”