BrainChip Holdings Limited (ASX: BRN), developer of a revolutionary embeddable semiconductor solution enabling hardware-based autonomous learning systems and applications, has signed a commercial marketing agreement with T2M, the world’s largest independent global semiconductor technology provider. Under the terms of the agreement T2M will act as a global representative of BrainChip’s technology solutions.

BrainChip’s ‘Spiking Neuron Adaptive Processor’ (SNAP) technology is a next generation hardware solution that acts like ‘digital neurons’, with the ability to learn autonomously, evolve and associate information just like the human brain. Peter van der Made, founder and CEO of BrainChip, comments, “Our SNAP technology is years ahead of deep learning; the latter is a simple accumulate and multiply software structure that has no biological equivalent whatsoever. Deep learning requires millions of samples and long ‘training’ periods that use an external optimizing technique on a fast computer. BrainChip SNAP on the other hand is fast and flexible, learning in seconds on the device itself.”

BrainChip’s SNAP learns by itself, without specific training, and finds patterns in the input stream that humans may not be aware of. This rapid learning capability opens up a whole new area of possibilities, to find images in a long video, patterns in stock market data, and thousands of other applications where deep learning is severely impaired.

The SNAP technology’s neurons autonomously learn through a process known as STDP (Synaptic Time Dependent Plasticity). The fully digital neurons process input spikes directly in hardware and are all updated in parallel, which means that the response time of the network is independent of the network size. Sensory neurons convert physical stimuli into spikes. Learning occurs when the input is intense, or repeating through feedback at each neuron and this is directly correlated to the way the brain learns.

Depending on power consumption requirements and network size, the SNAP technology can run faster than the speed of biological neurons and orders of magnitude faster than software neural networks.

The configurable technology is ideal for integration into portable devices for local processing of sensor data, enabling it to respond in real time with low latency, rather than having to send data to cloud-based computing.

An entire system can be embedded in a single chip, making it ideal for applications like pattern recognition or autonomous feature extraction. Typical applications where this could be embedded include smart phones, internet of things (IoT), robotics, driverless vehicles, drones and air transport, speech and image recognition and many other environments that can benefit from neural computations.

Since this is advanced state-of-the-art hardware, BrainChip chose T2M as its commercial marketing partner because of the company’s expertise in the global semiconductor industry and with delivering complex system-level solutions to manufacturers developing next generation mobile, IoT (internet of things), wearable technology products, consumer electronics, digital TV, security and image processing products.

T2M has a large portfolio of semiconductor IP (intellectual property), software and SoC white box IP which it supplies to integrated device manufacturers and original equipment manufacturers globally. Nigel Dixon, CEO of T2M, said “Our global presence provides BrainChip immediate exposure to the emerging neuromorphic technologies markets. In addition, T2M’s executives have extensive market, strategic and technical knowledge in licensing IP to the high tech industry, targeting relevant customers for BrainChip’s technology”.

“The partnership with T2M is another important step towards the integration of BrainChip’s IP into professional and consumer products worldwide,” said Peter van der Made. “T2M has extensive industry experience and contacts to help accelerate BrainChip’s route to market and continues our strategy of developing strong, worldwide partnerships with outstanding industry partners”.