SME snapshot

In the latest in our series on red-hot deep-tech companies, Martin Croome, vice president of marketing, gives us an introduction to ultralow-power GAP processors from GreenWaves Technologies.

GreenWaves

Enabling state-of-the-art machine learning and digital signal processing on energy-constrained devices

COMPANY: GreenWaves MAIN BUSINESS: semiconductor design, systems-on-chips LOCATION: Grenoble, France WEBSITE: greenwaves-technologies.com

Located in the micro-and nano-electronics hotspot of Grenoble, GreenWaves is a fabless semiconductor startup that was founded in 2014. GreenWaves designs and brings to market advanced ultra-low-power artificial intelligence (AI) and digital signal processing (DSP) processors for energy-constrained applications. Energyconstrained devices generally have to last for years on one battery – as in the case of IoT sensors – or have a very small battery, as we see with hearable or wearable products.

GreenWaves’ chief technology officer, Eric Flammand, was one of the founders of the Parallel Ultra Low Power (PULP) Platform that was started as a joint effort between the Integrated Systems Laboratory (IIS) of ETH Zürich and the Energy-efficient Embedded Systems (EEES) group of the University of Bologna in 2013 to explore new and efficient architectures for ultra-lowpower processing. GreenWaves collaborates with PULP members on high-performance, low-power architectures – such as the PULP cluster – and transforms the results into real products. As reported in HiPEACinfo 58, the company’s feedback has been invaluable in bringing PULP’s technology to a higher level of maturity.

PULP itself uses processor cores that implement the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). GreenWaves is a key contributor to the PULP project and has staff on two committees of RISC-V International . It has been one of the first companies to focus on the ‘very edge’ and to leverage an open-source RISC-V core at large commercial scale.

GreenWaves’ first product, the 55nm GAP8 processor, was one of the very first commercially available RISC-V processors and artificial intelligence (AI) microcontrollers. It allows massive deployment of low-cost, battery-operated intelligent devices that capture, analyse, classify and act on a fusion of rich data sources such images, sounds, radar signatures and vibrations.

GreenWaves’ second generation GAP9 processor enables a market-leading audio experience for hearable devices through ultra-low-power implementation of features such as neuralnetwork-steered, ultra-low-latency, active noise cancellation, neural-network-based noise reduction and 3D sound in hearable devices such as true wireless stereo earbuds.

GreenWaves’ GAP9 processor has been designed from the ground up to address a blend of classic DSP, ultra-low latency, sample-bysample time-domain DSP and neural-network workloads while preserving a high degree of flexibility and programmability. While GAP9 shares some system components with traditional microcontroller units (MCUs), its architecture is quite unique, enabling a revolution in the performance of extremely energyconstrained devices.

We have had customers developing on simulations and fieldprogrammable gate array (FPGA) versions of GAP9 for the past two years and on the real chip since February. Our customers have found the GAP9 hearable platform exceptionally power efficient for voice and music processing. It has given them headroom in both energy and processing power that they use to develop innovative new features in their products with no compromise in area, cost or energy. Our development tools enable software and hardware developers to productively harness the power of their processors using familiar neural-network and mathematical computing software. As one customer told us, ‘we do in weeks with GAP9 what we do with other platforms in months’.