Synopsis
The use cases for A2000 include surveillance through drones and CCTVs, robotics, intelligent video gateways and industrial automation. The 12 nm chip for the Thiruvananthapuram-based Netrasemi was fabricated at Taiwanese foundry TSMC.Listen to this article in summarized format
The use cases for A2000 include surveillance through drones and CCTVs, robotics, intelligent video gateways and industrial automation.
The 12 nm chip for the Thiruvananthapuram-based Netrasemi was fabricated at Taiwanese foundry TSMC.
A beneficiary of the government's design linked incentive (DLI) scheme, Netrasemi has raised Rs 125 crore from Unicorn India Ventures and Zoho so far. The company is currently in talks with global OEMs for early sample access for further R&D and co-development.
The SoC chip with smart vision and real-time video analytics capabilities enables on-device AI for smart cameras and edge AI platforms. The chip targets high-TOPS (Trillion (or Tera) Operations Per Second) AI performance, computer vision, video streaming, secure boot and significant IO capabilities such as PCIe. A2000 is one of India's few AI/ML chips and it features Netrasemi's in-house neural processor (NPU), vision cores (VPU), Image Signal Processor(ISP), crypto-engines and other hardware acceleration IP cores, the startup said in a statement. It also features their patented heterogeneous graph-stream parallel processing architecture.
“Our SoCs goes beyond conventional AI/ML integration by combining proprietary hardware acceleration IPs with domain-specific optimisations tailored for high-performance, real-time edge AI,” said Jyothis Indirabhai, cofounder and chief executive, Netrasemi. “The architecture is designed specifically for compact, power- and cost-sensitive edge devices. We are currently working with several leading OEMs to facilitate early sample evaluations, co-development, and advanced R&D initiatives.”
DLI and design infrastructure support played a key role in achieving this critical milestone, it said. The company was one of the first four startups selected for DLI support in 2023 by the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY).
Netrasemi, in collaboration with College of Engineering Trivandrum (CET) has developed another SoC chip (R1000 AI/ML MCU) for the IoT sensor market with support from MeitY's Chip-to-Startup (C2S) programme. The chip design was sent for fabrication last month. The company is also working on an advanced edge AI server chip (A4000) with support from MeitY, which will be fully fabrication ready by the second quarter of next year.
