NimbleAI: Towards Neuromorphic Sensing-Processing 3D-integrated Chips

Abstract

The NimbleAI Horizon Europe project leverages key principles of energy-efficient visual sensing and processing in biological eyes and brains, and harnesses the latest advances in 3D stacked silicon integration, to create an integral sensing-processing neuromorphic architecture that efficiently and accurately runs computer vision algorithms in area-constrained endpoint chips. The rationale behind the NimbleAI architecture is: sense data only with high information value and discard data as soon as they are found not to be useful for the application (in a given context). The NimbleAI sensing-processing architecture is to be specialized after-deployment by tunning system-level trade-offs for each particular computer vision algorithm and deployment environment. The objectives of NimbleAI are: (1) 100x performance per mW gains compared to state-of-the-practice solutions (i.e., CPU/GPUs processing frame-based video); (2) 50x processing latency reduction compared to CPU/GPUs; (3) energy consumption in the order of tens of mWs; and (4) silicon area of approx. 50 mm(2).