Ceva enhances Edge AI with TinyML NPUs for AIoT devices
Summary
These highly-efficient, self-sufficient NPUs deliver the power, performance, and cost efficiencies needed for semiconductor companies and OEMs to integrate TinyML models into their SoCs for consumer, industrial, and general-purpose AIoT products. By addressing the specific performance challenges of TinyML, the Ceva-NeuPro-Nano NPUs aim to make AI ubiquitous, economical, and practical for a wide range of use cases, spanning voice, vision, predictive maintenance, and health sensing in consumer and industrial IoT applications. "Ceva-NeuPro-Nano opens exciting opportunities for companies to integrate TinyML applications into low-power IoT SoCs and MCUs and builds on our strategy to empower smart edge devices with advanced connectivity, sensing, and inference capabilities. The Ceva-NeuPro-Nano family of NPUs enables more companies to bring AI to the very edge, resulting in intelligent IoT devices with advanced feature sets that capture more value for our customers," said Chad Lucien, Vice President and General Manager of the Sensors and Audio Business Unit at Ceva. • Scalable performance by design to meet a wide range of use cases • MAC configurations with up to 64 int8 MACs per cycle • Future proof architecture that supports the most advanced ML data types and operators • Ultimate ML performance for all use cases using advanced mechanisms • Highly efficient, single core design for NN compute, feature extraction, control code, and DSP code eliminates need for a companion MCU for these computationally intensive tasks • Up to 80% memory footprint reduction via Ceva-NetSqueeze which directly process compressed model weights without the need for an intermediate decompression stage • Dramatic energy and bandwidth reduction by distilling computations using weight-sparsity acceleration • Ceva-NeuPro Studio provides a unified AI stack, with an easy click-and-run experience, for all Ceva-NeuPro NPUs, from the new Ceva-NeuPro-Nano to the powerful Ceva-NeuPro-M • Fast time to market by accelerating software development and deployment • Optimised to work seamlessly with leading, open AI inference frameworks including TFLM and µTVM • Model Zoo of pretrained and optimised TinyML models covering voice, vision, and sensing use cases • Flexible to adapt to new models, applications, and market needs Ceva-NeuPro-Nano NPUs are now available for licensing.