Sakya is the founder and Chief Executive officer of EdgeCortix. He is an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologist, entrepreneur, and engineer with over a decade of experience in taking cutting edge AI research from ideation stage to scalable products, across different industry verticals. He has lead teams at global companies like Microsoft and IBM Research / IBM Japan, along with national research labs like RIKEN Japan and the Max Planck Institute Germany. Previously, he helped establish and lead the technology division at lean startups in Japan and Singapore, in semiconductor technology, robotics and Fintech sectors. Sakya is the inventor of over 20 patents and has published widely on machine learning and AI with over 1,000 citations.
Tell us about your company?
We are a fabless semiconductor company focused on enabling energy-efficient and sustainable artificial intelligence processing that will scale from edge computing to servers. I founded the company in 2019 with our development headquarters in Tokyo, Japan and we have now expanded our operations into both the United States and India. We deliver a software-first approach to AI focused processors, with our patented “hardware and software co-exploration” system to bring to market a unified edge AI acceleration platform. This platform provides an end-to-end solution for our customers with our MERA software and latest SAKURA low-power AI inference accelerators.
Our customers span a wide array of industries, including smart cities, robotics, manufacturing, aviation, aerospace, security, and telecommunications. While these industries are distinct and serve unique purposes, they all share a common goal of deploying extremely low power, high performance AI solutions at the edge. The edge is where the vast majority of data is now being created and collected, and because critical business decisions are being made there continuously, these decisions must be made accurately and securely. The other commonality between these industries is that they demand a combination of real-time processing, tight power restrictions and low-latency. This is where EdgeCortix’s solutions lives and excels, offering specialized hardware and software solutions to meet these demanding criteria.
What problems are you solving?
EdgeCortix was founded with the principal goal to solve the AI performance and power inefficiency challenges ‘at the edge’. Our core mission is to democratize access to all types of AI solutions by solving the fundamental mission of enabling near cloud-level AI performance at the edge, with better energy efficiency and speed, drastically reducing customer operating costs. Today, it is truly incredible to see how the latest generative AI and multi-modal AI applications are expanding so rapidly in the marketplace. These AI applications however, typically require massive computational and electrical power, which is tough at the edge where being performant, while maintaining energy-efficiency is critical. EdgeCortix has developed an industry leading, energy-efficient, ultra-low latency software and hardware acceleration platform, powered by our latest SAKURA-II devices that accelerates these multi-modal generative AI workloads, and empowers its customers to solve their edge-based challenges.
What application areas are your strongest?
Four industries where we have been seeing the most prominent demand, includes smart cities, industrial applications, aerospace and security. As municipalities implement more Smart City functionality, they face a variety of challenges in adding AI capabilities to analyze issues such as traffic congestion and security. Ultimately, smart surveillance can apply to any gathering place in a city with networks of cameras providing high-resolution video from many angles and collecting volumes of data. Using AI inference to accurately recognize people and items has the potential to keep citizens safe in crowded spaces in case of an emergency. From an industrial perspective we find the most traction in smart manufacturing – an area right now with so much potential for improvement in both production, cost savings and safety. In factories, edge AI solutions can enable optimization of production lines, predict equipment failures, and enhance quality control.
Real-time analysis of sensor data helps improve efficiency and reduce downtime. In the aerospace industry, our SAKURA-II solutions can assist in aircraft maintenance, provide quality assurance in manufacturing, and most importantly is a critical enabler for adding AI capabilities. It can ensure safety and reliability, all while minimizing maintenance costs. Last but not the least, we are very excited about the prospects of our AI processors being applied in the space industry from low-earth orbit to outer space environments. In this regard, the proven ability of our SAKURA devices to survive outer space radiation impact significantly better compared to comparable commercially off-the-shelf processors, as recently tested by NASA, opens up a variety of applications.
What keeps your customers up at night?
What keeps our customers up at night fuels our relentless focus during the day. We must solve for the edge AI performance and power inefficiency challenges. Our customers, no matter what industry they serve, are trying to do more with less. Less space, less cost, less power and less heat are all critical considerations, and our ability to deliver high performance and high efficiency while meeting these constraints is highly valued by our customers. In addition to these factors, a critical consideration point for all our customers has been software robustness. Every day we are considering how we can augment our software and solutions to help drive improved performance based on our customers’ unique needs. EdgeCortix operates on a global scale with teams spanning from Asia to North America. We are dedicated to fulfilling our customers’ needs around the clock.
What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?
Our goal is to meet our customers where they are in their technology stack and to help to future-proof their operations. I believe that we are in a truly unique market position. Many companies focus on either the hardware or the software, but the way in which we’ve developed our platform is unique. We apply equal importance to software development and chip design, and we started with software-first, and then enabling a robust hardware ecosystem. In addition to our patented run-time reconfigurable processor, the flexibility of our software and our ability to easily integrate within existing heterogeneous hardware platforms is not something we’re seeing made available from the rest of the industry today.
What new features/technology are you working on?
The SAKURA-II Edge AI platform is a complete AI solution comprised of three elements, the SAKURA-II silicon device, the Dynamic Neural Accelerator® (DNA) runtime reconfigurable (IP) neural processing architecture, and our MERA heterogeneous compiler software platform. We implement these technologies on a selection of hardware from M.2 modules, PCIe cards and compute boxes for immediate AI system deployment by our customers.
SAKURA-II is optimized for applications requiring fast, real-time (Batch=1) AI inferencing with excellent performance in a small footprint and low power silicon device. SAKURA-II is designed to handle the most challenging multi-modal AI applications at the edge, enabling designers to create new content based on disparate inputs like images, text, and sounds, and supports multi-billion parameter models like Llama 3, Stable Diffusion, DETR, Mistral, and ViT within few Watts of power.
Our Dynamic Neural Accelerator (DNA) is a flexible, modular dataflow architecture with our proprietary run-time reconfigurable data path connecting all major compute engines on chip, achieving exceptional parallelism and efficiency through dynamic grouping. Using a patented approach that combines sparsity handling, power management techniques, mixed precision support, vector and tensor processing, DNA achieves outstanding parallelism while reducing on-chip memory bandwidth, allowing faster, more efficient hardware execution.
MERA is a compiler and software framework providing a robust platform for deploying the latest neural network models in a machine learning framework agnostic manner. MERA enables optimized deep neural network graph compilation and inference, while providing the necessary tools, APIs, code-generator, and runtime libraries needed to deploy any pre-trained deep neural network from convolutions to the latest transformer models. MERA is designed to handle the most challenging AI applications at the edge with interfaces to open-source platforms like Hugging-Face as well as a rapidly growing EdgeCortix Model Library, enabling designers to create new content or deploy from a wide variety of existing models. MERA’s built-in heterogeneous support for other leading general-purpose processors, including AMD, Intel, Arm, and RISC-V, allows quick integration into existing systems.
How do customers normally engage with your company?
Our customers typically engage with us in the following three ways:
- Software: Customers who purchase a SAKURA solution will automatically access the EdgeCortix MERA Compiler software framework to deploy AI acceleration within their existing environments. In select cases we have also licensed our software to enable integration with other third-party Arm and X86 based hardware platforms, enhancing the overall ecosystem support.
- AI Accelerator Devices: EdgeCortix offers the latest SAKURA-II devices for purchase, a 60 TOPS (INT8) / 30 TFLOPS, yet small, low-power, mass produced product suitable for edge computing.
- AI Accelerator Cards & Modules: Customers can use our AI Accelerator hardware to directly integrate into their systems or solutions (orders available now). EdgeCortix currently offers SAKURA-II hardware in single and multi-chip low-profile PCIe Card and M.2 Module form factors.
We can be reached via the following:
Our contact page: https://www.edgecortix.com/en/contact
Our website: https://www.edgecortix.com/en/
Our LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/edgecortix/
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