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BrainChip unveils microscopic NPU that consumes less than 1 milliwatt of power | Designed for wearables, smart home, and IoT applications

The Akida Pico packs BrainChip's event-based neural processing capabilities into an area of just 0.12 square millimeters. Yet despite that size, it can handle relatively intensive AI...

The Akida platform allows the Pico to continuously monitor its inputs and wake up a main processor only when it detects something of interest, drastically reducing power usage. The company envisions this tiny device as enabling AI voice interfaces for smart home appliances, wearable assistants, automated doorbell cameras, and a lot more – basically anything that needs to detect and classify audio or sensor events while running for long periods on a battery charge. While BrainChip isn't giving out performance benchmarks, the Pico can reportedly handle limited neural models without problems, though it's certainly not meant for large-scale AI processing.

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