AMD announced a partnership with Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE), an incubator at IIT-Bombay, to promote semiconductor start-ups in India. Under this partnership, AMD will provide grants to IIT-B incubated startups working on the development of energy-efficient Spiking Neural Network (SNN) chips. The startups have to devise ways to significantly reduce energy consumption utilised by conventional neural networks.
Speaking about the initiative, Jaya Jagadish, Country Head, AMD India, said, At AMD, our goal is to reduce energy costs and increase efficiency across all our product lines. We aim to deliver a 30x improvement in energy efficiency for AMD processors and accelerators powering HPC and AI training by 2025. This means we are increasing the energy efficiency of compute nodes at a rate that is significantly faster than the aggregate industry-wide improvement made during the last five years. We continuously work with industry bodies and academia to support initiatives that help drive innovation in this field.
“As India looks to execute a comprehensive semiconductor strategy, it is important to nurture, build and grow startups in this space. As design cycles are long and cost of entry high in the semiconductor design area, it is SINE’s endeavor to foster and create strong, product-focussed, cutting-edge semiconductor design startups by addressing gaps in the industry”., said Shaji Varghese, CEO, SINE- IIT Bombay.
The first grant was given to Numelo Technologies for developing SNN chips using ultralow power quantum tunnelling on silicon on insulator (SOI) technology.Speaking on the occasion Prof. Udayan Ganguly, Director, Numelo Tech said, “Our focus to offer extended battery life, enhanced data privacy, and feature a versatile architecture capable of facilitating sound, image, and video recognition, has led us to develop a host of innovations at the technology, circuit and systems architecture and algorithms/software level.” Speaking to the technology’s distinguishing factor, they added, “As a startup in this area, we greatly value to interact with the senior and distinguished engineers at AMD who can mentor the program, we believe this adds far greater value than just the grant itself.”
This partnership is part of AMD’s Corporate Social Responsibility initiative. AMD prioritises inclusion of quality education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and promoting scientific research as a part of its CSR program.