Frangipani
Top 20
Posters who love to diss our competition will surely say “But… they’re not digital… they don’t have on-chip learning… they’re only good enough for harvesting the low-hanging fruit etc.”, yet, when they really open their eyes, they cannot deny that the team behind Delft-based Innatera are making strides in targeting those low-hanging fruit (which are also part of BrainChip’s market!) and will have to acknowledge that Innatera are very present both on social media and at real-life events (which - at the same time - is good for us, as it helps to spread awareness of the benefits of neuromorphic computing in general).
Some recent examples:
www.linkedin.com
www.linkedin.com
innatera.com
The founder of Innatera partner CYRAN AI Solutions, Manan Suri, is in turn closely connected to TCS Research - he has been a Research Advisor to the TCS Innovation Team on Neuromorphic Computing and Edge AI since June 2021…
… and we know that Sounak Dey from TCS Research does not have Akida-only blinders on when it comes to neuromorphic computing:
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-438883
Also cf. this June 2025 paper:
www.eu.socionext.com
Then there was this video by Anastasiia Nosova in her “Anastasi In Tech” YouTube channel a few weeks ago:
In recent months, Innatera have also been really chummy with Pete Bernard and the Edge AI Foundation team:
www.linkedin.com
Some recent examples:
Innatera’s Pulsar microcontroller shines at SEMICON India | Shreyas Derashri
Thrilled to be heading into SEMICON India 2025 (SEMI India) this week 🇮🇳🇳🇱! This event is a milestone for us at Innatera — we are showcasing live use cases built by our partners on our neuromorphic processor. Seeing partners like Aaroh Labs (smart smoke detection) and CYRAN AI Solutions...
#risewithaarohlabs #samiconindia #eaglesmokedetector #launch | Aaroh Labs
𝐈𝐧𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐀𝐚𝐫𝐨𝐡 𝐋𝐚𝐛𝐬' 𝐒𝐦𝐨𝐤𝐞 𝐃𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 𝐋𝐚𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐡 You're invited to join us at Aaroh Labs as we unveil our innovative Smoke Detector product, powered by Innatera' s cutting-edge Spiking Neural Processor – a brain-inspired architecture that brings ultra-low power consumption...
Innatera’s Pulsar microcontroller shines at SEMICON India
Breakthrough neuromorphic chip brings real-time, ultra-low-power intelligence to next-gen sensing applications
The founder of Innatera partner CYRAN AI Solutions, Manan Suri, is in turn closely connected to TCS Research - he has been a Research Advisor to the TCS Innovation Team on Neuromorphic Computing and Edge AI since June 2021…
The below LinkedIn post is another reminder that our friends at TCS Research - Sounak Dey, Arijit Mukherjee & Arpan Pal - are not exclusively friends with us, when it comes to neuromorphic computing, but also close friends with others developing their own technology in that field, eg. Manan Suri and his research group at IIT Delhi. In 2018, Manan Suri founded CYRAN AI Solutions as a spinoff from that uni lab and has been a Research Advisor to the TCS Innovation Team on Neuromorphic Computing and Edge AI since June 2021.
![]()
#indian #industry #deeptech #academia #intelligent #neuromorphic #intelligence #space #sensor #imc | Manan Suri | 12 comments
Common discourse goes- "#Indian #Industry is often not investing in #deeptech R&D while #Academia stays away from ground requirements of the industry" There are increasing number of exceptions to this chatter 🙂! Here, I'll highlight one such close collaboration b/w our research group (at...www.linkedin.com
View attachment 82693 View attachment 82694
![]()
Manan Suri - Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi | LinkedIn
| MIT - TR 35 | IEEE EDS Early Career | Young Scientist NASI | Young Engineer IEI |… · Experience: Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi · Education: Institut national polytechnique de Grenoble · Location: India · 500+ connections on LinkedIn. View Manan Suri’s profile on LinkedIn, a...www.linkedin.com
View attachment 82699
View attachment 82700
![]()
This Engineer’s Hardware Is Inspired by the Brain
Manan Suri’s neuromorphic systems run AI on sensors, drones, and VR headsetsspectrum.ieee.org
This Engineer’s Hardware Is Inspired by the Brain
Manan Suri’s neuromorphic systems run AI on sensors, drones, and VR headsets
EDD GENT
23 JAN 2024
5 MIN READ
![]()
Manan Suri displays a wafer-level testing system for unpackaged chips and devices built by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.
MANAN SURI
In work and in life, it’s easy to get stuck in your ways. That’s why Manan Surihas always looked to expand his horizons both professionally and personally.
Growing up in India, he was used to transitions and new experiences because his family frequently moved around the country as his father relocated for his job as a chemical engineer. Traveling stuck with Suri in adulthood. He studied and worked in Dubai, the United States, France, and Belgium over the course of his twenties.
Manan Suri
EMPLOYER:
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
OCCUPATION:
Associate professor and founder of Cyran AI Solutions, New Delhi
EDUCATION:
Bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering, both from Cornell; Ph.D. in nanoelectronics from the CEA-Leti research institute in Grenoble, France
Eventually, Suri moved back to India to become an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. There he set up a research group focused on developing brain-inspired (neuromorphic) computer hardware for low-power devices like sensors, drones, and virtual-reality headsets. He is now an associate professor.
He also launched a startup to commercialize his lab’s expertise: Cyran AI Solutions, based in New Delhi, works with companies and government agencies on a variety of projects. These include automating the inspection process for identifying defects in semiconductors and developing computer-vision systems to improve crop yields and analyze geospatial Earth-observation data.
While balancing a career in academia and industry is challenging, Suri says, he relishes the opportunity to constantly learn.
“Once I’ve figured out how a system works, I start getting bored,” he says.
Suri, an IEEE member, believes that embracing change is a key ingredient for success. This is what has driven him to continually move on to new projects, push into new disciplines, and even move from country to country to experience a different way of life.
“It accelerates your ability to learn new things,” he says. “It puts you on a fast trajectory and helps shed some of your inhibitions or get over the inertia in what you’re doing or how you’re living.”
Inspired by Cornell’s semiconductor lab
Growing up, Suri’s passion was physics, but he quickly realized he was drawn more to the practical applications than theory. This led to a fascination with electronics.
In 2005 he initially enrolled at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, in India, and studied electronics and instrumentation at the institute’s campus in Dubai. After his second year, he transferred to Cornell, in Ithaca, N.Y. His first six months living in the United States, acclimating to a new culture and a different academic environment, were overwhelming, Suri says. What hooked him were Cornell’s high-end facilities available to students studying semiconductor engineering and nanofabrication—in particular, the industry-grade semiconductor clean rooms.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering in 2009 and a master’s degree in the same subject the following year.
New skills in computational neuroscience
After graduating, Suri received offers for Ph.D. positions in the United States and Europe to work on conventional electronics projects. But he didn’t want to get pigeonholed as a traditional semiconductor engineer. He was intrigued by an offer to study neuromorphic systems at the CEA-Leti research institute in Grenoble, France. He was also eager to broaden his life experience and get a taste of the European way of doing things.
The work would push Suri to develop new skills in computational neuroscience and computer science. In 2010 he started a Ph.D. program in the institute’s Advanced Memory Technology Group. There he worked on low-power AI hardware that uses new kinds of nonvolatile memory to emulate how biological synapses process data. This involved using phase-change memory and conductive-bridging RAM to create neural networks for visual pattern extraction and auditory pattern sensitivity.
Suri discovered that his experience with electronics allowed him to approach neuromorphic engineering problems from an entirely different angle than his colleagues had considered. Experts can develop fairly rigid and conventional ways of thinking about their own field, he says, but when those with different skill sets apply them to the same problems, it can often lead to more innovative thinking. “You bring a completely different perspective,” he says. “It leads to a lot of creativity.”
Setting up his own research lab
After finishing his doctorate in nanoelectronics, Suri got a job working on high-voltage transistors for automotive applications at the semiconductor designer NXP Semiconductors, in Brussels. Since his role was to take a project all the way from concept to fabrication, it was as close to pure research as he could get in industry. But as interesting as the work was, Suri says, he missed the intellectual freedom of academia.
When the opportunity of setting up his own lab at IIT Delhi came along, he jumped at it. He had also been away from his home country for almost a decade and wanted to be closer to family and contribute to the Indian science and technology ecosystem, he says.
“Moving abroad was more a matter of collecting experiences and seeing how different places work,” he says.
Suri’s group at IIT Delhi has made contributions to AI hardware, neuromorphic hardware, and hardware security. The group collaborates with industry research teams around the world, including Meta Reality Labs, Tata Consultancy Services, and GlobalFoundries.
Launching a startup
Despite returning to academia, Suri says he has always been interested in developing practical solutions to real-world challenges, and this goal has guided his research. Whatever project he works on, he always asks himself two questions: Will it solve a real problem? And will someone buy it?
Suri launched his startup in 2018 to turn some of his lab’s work in AI and neuromorphic hardware into commercial products. Cyran AI Solutions’ customers hire the company to solve a range of problems. These have included computer-vision systems for detecting defects in computer chips; hyperspectral data-analysis algorithms designed to run in real time on chips for crop-inspection drones; and AI systems for small, low-power devices and challenging environments like satellites.
![]()
Manan Suri and researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi’s lab designed this custom electrical test setup for the characterization of memory-computing chips. MANAN SURI
While Cyran makes use of its neuromorphic expertise for some problems, it often uses more mature and simpler-to-deploy machine-learning approaches.
“Most users don’t really care about what technology we are using,” Suri says. “They just want functional performance at the most cost-effective price.”
One of the biggest lessons Suri learned from running a startup is to consider the market being served. For earlier projects, he says, the company often devised a solution that was specific to just one customer’s needs and couldn’t be repurposed for other uses. To create a sustainable business, he realized he needed to develop generic solutions that could be deployed more broadly.
“Running Cyran has been like [pursuing a] mini-MBA,” he says. “You need to really pay attention to the market aspects and not just the technology.”
In 2018, MIT Technology Review named Suri one of its 35 Innovators Under 35for his work on neuromorphic computing.
The need to be hands-on
Keeping a foot in both academia and industry can be challenging, Suri says. Facing resource crunches, whether in time, staffing, or funding, is common. The only way he’s able to manage things is to plan extensively and remain nimble, building in contingencies.
If you can manage it, Suri says, having your fingers in many pies can have major benefits. In particular, working on problems that bridge several disciplines can help you break out of rigid thinking and come up with novel solutions.
It’s not possible to dedicate equal amounts of time to learning every area, he says, so he advises up-and-coming engineers to carefully pick the topics that are most likely to advance their progress. It’s also crucial to dive in and get your hands dirty, rather than focusing on theory, initially.
“Take the plunge and try and figure it out,” he recommends. “As the problem unravels, then you can start getting into the theory or the more formal aspects of the project. You also start to appreciate learning more about the theory as it gets more hands-on.”
View attachment 82698
… and we know that Sounak Dey from TCS Research does not have Akida-only blinders on when it comes to neuromorphic computing:
https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-438883
Also cf. this June 2025 paper:
Despite our years of collaboration with TCS researchers and the above encouraging affirmation of an “active alliance” with Tata Elxsi, we should not ignore that TCS are also exploring other neuromorphic options for what will ultimately be their own clients.
And while a number of TCS patents do refer to Akida as an example of a neuromorphic processor that could be utilised, they always also refer to Loihi, as far as I’m aware of.
A recent case in point for Tata Consultancy Research’s polyamory is the June 2025 paper “The Promise of Spiking Neural Networks for Ubiquitous Computing: A Survey and New Perspectives”, co-authored by five Singapore Management University (SMU) researchers as well as Sounak Dey and Arpan Pal from TCS, both very familiar names to regular readers of this forum.
Although we know those two TCS researchers to be fans of Akida, they sadly did not express a preference for BrainChip’s neuromorphic processor over those from our competitors in below paper published less than six weeks ago.
On the contrary, in their concluding “key takeaway” recommendations of neuromorphic hardware (“We make the following recommendations for readers with different needs considering neuromorphic hardware chipsets”), the seven co-authors do not even mention Akida at all.
Even more surprisingly, the section on Akida is factually incorrect:
- AKD1500 is a first generation reference chip and is not based on Akida 2.0, BrainChip’s second generation platform that supports TENNs and vision transformers.
- An AKD2000 reference chip does not (yet) exist - it may or may not materialise. At present, only Akida 2.0 IP is commercially available - not an actual silicon chip, as claimed by the paper’s authors.
- The paper is in total ignorance of ultra-low-power Akida Pico, operating on less than 1mW of power, which was revealed by our company back in October 2024 and is based on Akida 2.0.
It is highly unlikely this (possibly revised) version of the paper published on 1 June 2025 would have been submitted to arXiv prior to BrainChip’s announcement of Akida Pico, and we can safely assume Sounak Dey and Arpan Pal would have been aware of that October 2024 BrainChip announcement (unlike maybe their SMU co-authors).
One could argue the reason Akida Pico is not mentioned could possibly be that an actual Akida Pico chip is not commercially available, yet, given the authors state
“5.2 Neuromorphic Hardware
In this subsection, we summarize the latest commercially available neuromorphic hardware chipsets, highlighting their capabilities and development support for building and deploying spiking neural networks.”,
which, however, in turn begs the question, why Loihi 2 is listed, then, as it was always conceptualised as a research chip and is not commercially available. In the paragraph on Loihi 2, the authors correctly state that “this neuromorphic research chipset is available only through the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community (INRC).”
Given the fact that Sounak Dey and Arpan Pal co-authored this paper, the above inaccuracies are bewildering, to say the least. Did the two TCS researchers who both have firsthand experience with Akida contribute to only part of this paper and not proofread the final version before it was submitted?
Either way not a good look…
View attachment 88480
(…)
View attachment 88481 View attachment 88482 View attachment 88483
(…)
View attachment 88484
Socionext Europe • What happens when precision radar sensor meets brain-inspired AI?
At Socionext, we’re excited to partner with Innatera to unlock the next generation of smart automation. In our latest video, Miguel Estevez, Product Marketing…
Then there was this video by Anastasiia Nosova in her “Anastasi In Tech” YouTube channel a few weeks ago:
Interesting !!
In recent months, Innatera have also been really chummy with Pete Bernard and the Edge AI Foundation team:
#edgeai #genedgeai #agenticedgeai #neuromorphic #tinyml #edgeaievents | Pete Bernard
Yes, "I am presenting" - see you in Amsterdam, in late September. The EDGE AI FOUNDATION has coordinated, for the first time, with Wienke Giezeman and his team to bring the edge AI community to The Things Conference. We will have over a dozen partners there, including Arduino, Edge Impulse (a...
Last edited: