EnCharge raises $22.6M to commercialize its AI-accelerating chips
Summary
Around a year ago, TechCrunch wrote about a little-known company developing AI-accelerating chips to face off against hardware from titans of industry -- e.g. Nvidia, AMD, Microsoft, Meta, AWS and Intel. "Verma, the director of Princetons Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education, launched EnCharge last year with Echere Iroaga and Kailash Gopalakrishnan. Iroaga previously led semiconductor company Macoms connectivity business unit as VP and then GM.EnCharge has its roots in federal grants Verma received in 2017 alongside collaborators at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. An outgrowth of DARPAs Electronics Resurgence Initiative, which aims to advance a range of computer chip technologies, Verma led an $8.3-million effort to investigate new types of non-volatile memory devices.In contrast to the "volatile" memory prevalent in todays computers, non-volatile memory can retain data without a continuous power supply, making it theoretically more energy efficient.DARPA also funded Vermas research into in-memory computing -- "in-memory," here, referring to running calculations in RAM to reduce the latency introduced by storage devices.EnCharge was launched to commercialize Vermas research. "EnCharge products can provide the processing power the market is demanding while addressing the extremely high energy requirement and cost roadblocks that organizations are facing.