Hi Fact Finder,
what makes you so sure it wasn’t the other way round, i.e., one of the EDGX co-founders (a company founded in 2023) found out from someone at ESA about the benefits of using Akida?
After all, our guy in Germany, Alf Kuchenbuch, stated in an October 2023 LinkedIn comment that
ESA microelectronics and data handling engineer Laurent Hili told him, his first contact with Brainchip had been at an AI conference in Santa Clara back in 2019 or 2020!
Which means we can safely assume the latest possible date would have been the 4th Annual Global Artificial Intelligence Conference Santa Clara 2020 from January 21 - 23, 2020, as the then unfolding COVID pandemic did not allow for any in-person conferences for many months to come, plus the closure of the US borders would have made any attendance by EU citizens not residing in the US impossible.
Which in turn means ESA has known about Akida for at least four years, possibly even five years, although knowing about it obviously doesn’t equate to testing it…
Akida was also mentioned several times alongside other neuromorphic processors (albeit only Loihi and BrainScaleS 2 were discussed in more detail) in an arXiv preprint published by ESA researchers on December 17, 2022 titled
Neuromorphic Computing and Sensing in Space (
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.05236.pdf), which also happens to reveal that ESA engineers had been considering neuromorphic solutions since 2010, so they surely would have observed the neuromorphic landscape closely all these years.
“Early work [10, 11] performed in 2010 at the Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) suggested considering a neuromorphic approach for onboard spacecraft applications.”
Whether / When ESA got their hands on AKD1000, I obviously don’t know.
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So let’s say Laurent Hili’s first contact with Brainchip was at said January 2020 Santa Clara AI Conference. At that time, according to their LinkedIn profiles, two of the EDGX core trio were still attending university, pursuing their B.Sc. (Wouter Benoot) resp. M.Sc. (João Matias), so it’s rather unlikely that they would have come in contact with Akida then.
EDGX CEO Nick Destrycker, however, could have learnt about Akida around the same time or even earlier than Laurent Hili. I personally hadn’t been aware of the exact nature of his previous start-up until now: Quite the visionary, he had already seen huge potential in Edge AI back in 2019, when he co-founded and became the CEO of Edgise, which was located in the immediate vicinity of his alma mater KU Leuven and two of his former employers: imec (the nanoelectronics and digital technologies R&D hub that also has collaborations with KU Leuven) and ICsense.
It seems Edgise is now defunct resp. morphed into EDGX (
www.Edgise.be now links to
www.EDGX.space) with a different co-founder and moved to Ghent, another Belgian city.
I found an interesting article published on April 22, 2022 on Edgise’s evolution from a start-up dabbling in general Edge AI to focussing on space tech:
www.raccoons.be
"Initially, we focused on technology, and not on a market. Because we didn't have a market segment, we were all over the place," laughs Destrycker. "We were doing projects around smart cities, healthcare and food at the time. But we always had a limited impact. In the mid-2020s [sic! I checked the Dutch original of that article, which says midden 2020, so this is obviously a translation error and should be in mid-2020] however, we came into contact with space companies. That's how the ball got rolling, and we saw that our technology could have a big impact there. We entered into a collaboration with ESA, the European Space Agency. That went so well that we then made the confident decision to go full steam ahead with space exploration."
So, Edgise went from being a general edge computing start-up, to one with a strong focus on space. Was that pivot difficult? "It was very gradual," Destrycker answers. "We got in touch with a company that needed edge AI on a satellite. That's how we developed a demo, and the ball got rolling. We visited ESA together, and our first full-fledged space project saw the light of day."
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In mid 2022, Edgise was selected to participate in the EU-funded Project ENLIGHTEN (European Initiative for Low cost, Innovative & Green High Thrust Engine” (November 1, 2022 - October 31, 2025), coordinated by ArianeGroup, the French aerospace company developing its next-generation two stage Ariane 6 launch vehicle - its launch at the Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou / French Guiana is planned for mid-2024.
Fun fact: ArianeGroup was formerly known as Airbus Safran Launchers, a joint venture between Airbus and Safran, and we know for a fact that Brainchip collaborated with one of Safran’s subsidiaries, Safran Electrical & Power, in 2017.
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Of course, I have no idea at what point in time Nick Destrycker stumbled upon Akida - even before he co-founded Edgise or at a later stage - but I’d deem it possible that he actually learnt about Brainchip’s tech through someone at ESA, not the other way round.
A while ago, I shared my interpretation of what Bernd Westhoff from Renesas could have meant by saying (in a video from Embedded World 2023) that it was the very first time any vendor “on Earth” had launched the first Arm Cortex-M85 + AI combo implementation on silicon.
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-397848
Maybe it wasn’t NASA after all, but ESA instead that gave Akida that (unconfirmed) ride into space?! Just my wild speculation, no evidence whatsoever…
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