BrainChip Holdings Ltd., a leading developer of software and hardware accelerated solutions for advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning applications, today announced that it has shipped its first BrainChip Accelerator card to a major European automobile manufacturer.

As the first commercial implementation of a hardware-accelerated spiking neural network (SNN) system, the shipment of BrainChip Accelerator is a significant milestone in neuromorphic computing, a branch of artificial intelligence that simulates neuron functions. BrainChip Accelerator will be evaluated for use in Advanced Driver Assisted (ADAS) and Autonomous Vehicle (AV) applications.

The shipment follows the launch of BrainChip Accelerator on 10th September 2017.

BrainChip Accelerator increases the performance of object recognition provided by BrainChip Studio software and algorithms. The low-power accelerator card can detect, extract and track objects using a proprietary SNN technology. It provides a 7x improvement in images/second/watt, compared to traditional convolutional neural networks accelerated by Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).

Bob Beachler, BrainChip’s Senior Vice President for Marketing and Business Development, said: “This is an exciting first evaluation of BrainChip Accelerator that was released just last month. Our spiking neural network provides instantaneous “one-shot” learning, is fast at detecting, extracting and tracking objects, and is very low-power. These are critical attributes for automobile manufacturers processing the large amounts of video required for ADAS and AV applications. We look forward to working with this world-class automobile manufacturer in applying our technology to meet its requirements.”