Menta’s technology to support the development of cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology in Europe.
Sophia Antipolis, April 12th, 2023 – Menta, a French deeptech company specializing in semiconductor design, announces that it has joined the NimbleAI consortium. This project brings together 19 European partners and is funded by the European Union. Its objective is to improve the energy efficiency and performance of neuromorphic chips.
The consortium partners have been carefully selected to cover the entire semiconductor value chain to ensure that everything that results from this project is relevant to industry.
Neuromorphic engineering aims to foster the deployment of artificial intelligence-based applications by mimicking brain function. This type of technology is key for the development of the autonomous vehicle industry.
“We are delighted to contribute to the design of this 3D neuromorphic chip with our technological expertise, which is in line with Europe’s ambitions to strengthen its research capabilities and industry in the field of Artificial Intelligence,” said Vincent Markus, CEO of Menta, before adding, “our technology has been built to be easily integrated with other partners technologies that all together are critical for low power ever evolving AI inference.”
Sophia Antipolis
The eFPGA technology developed by Menta is an answer to the problem of obsolescence induced by Artificial Intelligence. Algorithms such as those used by AI evolve 4 times faster than the production rate of a chip. Therefore, the ability to reprogram chips after they have been produced allows them to be constantly adapted to these needs. This is particularly true for the aeronautics, space and automotive sectors but also for the medical imagery. Menta is currently the only industrialized European solution for embedded programmable logic and is involved in several European projects such as the EPI-SGA2 Project, the PROMISE Project and the new MOSAICs-LP Project, aimed at promoting European production and competitiveness in the semiconductor industry.
About Menta :
Menta is a privately held company based in Sophia-Antipolis (France). Menta is a proven pioneer of eFGPAs for ASIC and SoC designers seeking speed, accuracy, performance and efficiency. eFGPA’s adaptable architecture, based on design-adaptive standard cells-based and a state-of-the-art tool set, provides the highest degree of design customization, best-in-class testability, and fastest time-of-volume for SoC design at any foundry.
About NimbleAI
NimbleAI will design EDA tools to customize and integrate technologies and components (light-field-enabled dynamic vision sensing, event-based inference and processing, specialized processing with in-memory computing and programmable logic (eFPGA), embedded ReRAM-based storage, 3D integration of circuit layers (TSV-based inter-layer data movement), mutual adaptation of sensing and processing to operate at optimal DVFS point, dedicated software tools) and will deliver a prototype FPGA implementation of the 3D silicon stacked sensing and processing architecture, as well as the corresponding programming tools to develop and run computer vision applications on this architecture. The prototype will serve as a research vehicle for testing new concepts, new computer vision algorithms, and new runtime optimizations. The results of NimbleAI will lead to practical implementations in the next generations of commercially available neuromorphic chips. In fact, the project will fabricate some test chips to validate some key concepts in silicon.