Podcast EP235: Tinier than TinyML: pushing the flexible boundaries of AI – Pragmatic Semiconductor
Dan is joined by Dr. Richard Price, CTO and Dr. Konstantinos Iordanou, a senior ASIC designer at Pragmatic Semiconductor.
Richard has over 25 years’ experience in the development and commercialisation of a wide range of new technologies based on novel processes, materials and flexible electronics. Richard is also a non-executive director at the Henry Royce Institute – the UK’s National Institute for advanced materials research. Konstantinos Iordanou is working on pioneering projects that push the limits of flexible IC technology. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from The University of Manchester and specialises in computer microarchitecture, digital design, hardware accelerators and heterogeneous systems.
Dan explores the unique and disruptive technology of Pragmatic Semiconductor, a UK-based leader in flexible integrated circuit technology and semiconductor manufacturing. The company uses thin-film semiconductors to create ultra-thin, flexible integrated circuits, known as FlexICs, that are significantly lower cost and faster to produce than silicon chips – talking days, rather than months to produce.
Richard and Konstantinos discuss their groundbreaking work on tiny classifiers, in which they created world’s tiniest ML inference hardware on a flexible substrate. Uniquely, an evolutionary algorithm is used to automatically generate classification hardware. The resulting chip is extremely small in area – fewer than 300 logic gates.
When implemented on a flexible substrate, such as a FlexIC, this classifier occupies up to 75 times less area, consumes up to 75 times less power and has six times better yield than the most hardware-efficient ML baseline.
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