Neuromorphic processor leader Innatera appoints Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli Chairman of Board

Cadence and Synopsys co-founder brings a wealth of industry and technology experience.

The Netherlands, July 14, 2021 – Innatera, the pioneering Dutch neuromorphic processor company, announced the appointment of Prof. Alberto L. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli as Chairman of its Board of Directors.

Prof. Vincentelli is a legendary figure in the semiconductor industry, having had profound contributions to the development of new semiconductor technologies, as well as their commercialization. He co-founded the two leading Electronic Design Automation companies Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys, served on the Board of Directors of Cadence, KPIT, Expert.ai and Cy4Gate, advisory boards of HP, STMicroelectronics, General Motors and United Technologies and as consultant to Mercedes, Intel and BMW. Prof. Vincentelli is the Edgar L. and Harold H. Buttner Chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, and has had a distinguished career marked by numerous awards.

Prof. Vincentelli is Innatera’s first Chairman, taking up the leadership of an already strong board that includes visionary deep-tech investors Christian Reitberger of btov Partners and Soren Hein of MIG Verwaltungs AG, and renowned Prof. Geert Leus of the Delft University of Technology.

“In a market that is crowded by numerous semiconductor plays on AI, I am excited by Innatera’s differentiated approach to achieving ultra-low power intelligence at the sensor edge”, said Prof. Vincentelli. “Success for a chip company follows from a combination of disruptive technology, flawless execution and a great team, and I believe Innatera is in the sweet spot”. Beyond this, Prof. Vincentelli stressed the importance of having fun and mentioned that he was looking forward to working with Innatera’s leadership team.

Sumeet Kumar, CEO said: “It is an honor for us to have Prof. Vincentelli on our board and a testament to the strong fundamentals Innatera is built on. He is no stranger to taking revolutionary new technologies to market, and brings a wealth of industry experience and wisdom.”

Sub-milliwatt signal processing with the Spiking Neural Processor

Prof. Vincentelli joins the company at an exciting time. Innatera just revealed tantalizing details of its Spiking Neural Processor (SNP) at the Linley Spring Processor Conference in April this year. The radically new analog-mixed signal architecture closely mimics the mechanisms that our brain uses to condition and process sensory data. Using a massively parallel array of spiking neurons and synapses, Innatera’s architecture provides native acceleration for continuous-time spiking neural networks with fine-grained temporal dynamics. This allows the SNP architecture to realize high-fidelity signal processing and pattern recognition in real time, within a sub-milliwatt power budget.

At the conference, Innatera demonstrated the efficacy of its approach with promising results. The company showed a tiny spiking neural network model performing real-time audio recognition with only 500 spike events per inference. Each spike consumes sub-picojoule energy, approaching the energy levels of biological neurons and synapses. Key to this, Innatera says, is its combination of the novel spiking approach and its ultra-low power analog-mixed signal silicon architecture.

“Innatera’s neuromorphic architecture operates at extremely low power, especially when compared with traditional deep-learning accelerators,” noted Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group. “Unlike other analog vendors, Innatera offers software to abstract the analog fabric’s complexity, making it simple for the customer to use. This approach is well suited to bringing intelligence to low-power sensors.”

At the measurement station of Innatera’s lab, Dr. Amir Zjajo, Chief Scientist commented about the company’s latest silicon, “Our characterization of the chip shows the excellent power-performance capabilities of analog-mixed signal spiking compute technologies, and how much intelligence they will allow us to integrate into edge sensing applications”. Innatera expects to sample to select customers in the second half of 2021. The company’s silicon engineering is complemented by the development of an innovative new SDK, as well as a slew of application developments which the company promises to provide more insight into later this year.

About Innatera Nanosystems

Innatera is a trailblazing developer of ultra-low power neuromorphic processors for AI at the sensor edge. The fast-growing semiconductor company currently has 30 employees across its headquarters in the Netherlands and its new design center in Bangalore, India. Incorporated in 2018 as a spin-off from the Delft University of Technology, the company builds on over a decade of research into computational neuroscience and low-power processing. The company raised $6 million in its seed round in October 2020 from Munich-based deep-tech investors MIG Verwaltungs AG and the Industrial Technologies Fund of btov Partners.