Here's a very interesting article published 5 hours ago. It's a Q&A with Michael Hurlston, the CEO of Synaptics, a developer of hardware and software used in touchpads in computers, autos and smart home devices.. Lots of interesting info about their revenue, R&D spending, share price, difficulties in hiring, etc. TSMC are their largest supplier.
The article states "In March, Synaptics showcased innovations at tinyML Summit, including edge AI tech with low-power SoCs relying on neural network engines for vision, sound-detection and speech processing.
But what really stood out to me was this section...
Extract Only
FE: How does the demand for lower power in chips affect you?
Hurlston: With almost everything we do, power is an issue and so having lower power makes a difference. With AI at the edge, we know that a big driver of the battery in a phone is the display, so we have a face-detect AI algorithm. So, when the phone is close to the face when someone’s in the act of talking on the phone, we shut down the display. It’s a simple AI algorithm and we lock it in. Our phone manufacturing customers beat it up to death in testing, so they are not having fake shutdowns. They try to trick it a hundred different ways.
Here's another example of AI and machine learning… Today, we can do simple things like read license plates or read meters or count people. We can count people coming of a room. Instead of passing that task to a data center, you resolve it on a chip and the advantage is power savings where you don’t need to have a big engine, with passing back to the data center and the latency involved and ultimately the cost.
Take the example of a general purpose, low-power camera handed to a customer with tinyML to do something like identify sick chickens in a chicken coop that are sneezing. That’s a very specific use case, but a general purpose approach takes data and generates an ML model compiled onto a chip.
Michael Hurlston is CEO of Synaptics, a publicly-traded developer of hardware and software used in many products, including touchpads in computers, autos and smart home devices. | Synaptics innovates IoT as its stock plummets amid supply and labor shortages
www.fierceelectronics.com
