Chips&Media Unveils WAVE-N: A Custom NPU for High-Quality, High-Resolution Imaging

Jun. 05, 2025 – 

June 5, 2025 -- Chips&Media unveiled WAVE-N that is a custom NPU designed to work with imaging application at high-quality and high-resolution for edge device market at Embedded Vision Summit 2025 in Santa Clara San Jose, California.

Key notes:

• Extreme efficiency, up to 90% of MAC utilization, for Modern CNN Computation 
• Highly optimized for real-time video processing at high-resolution such as 4K60fps
• Area efficiency, close to INT8, with no risk in quantization and fixed-point arithmetic error – only 4M logic gates for 1024 16bit floating point MACs
• Power efficiency that prevents thermal issues by zero or minimum DRAM bandwidth consumption

WAVE-N is a custom NPU designed to work for imaging application at high-quality and high-resolution in edge devices. Compared to typical generic NPU, it provides extreme computation power in 16bit floating point format for high performance together with competitive enough area and power efficiency.

Key technology in WAVE-N is adopting line-by-line processing in CNN computation. It enables extreme computation capability in terms of performance and resolution to process imaging applications. Compared to frame-by-frame, line-by-line processing can be done within SRAM that is part of WAVE-N, and it prevents interactions with DRAM. DRAM bandwidth usually causes latency and power consumption, which is the two most critical factors in edge devices. Chips&Media applies line-by-line processing to WAVE-N and eliminates the root cause of the problems in latency and power. As an example, together with Chips&Media’s in-house Super Resolution network/model, WAVE-N shows zero DRAM bandwidth consumption and supports high quality AI based upscaling at 4K resolution in real time at competitive power cost.

Another key thing with WAVE-N is area efficiency based on Chips&Media’s 20+ year experience in HW IP design and development. Most generic NPU, due to area concern, deliver computation capability in 8bit fixed integer format by significant cost of network/model development to balance quality and performance. HOWEVER, WAVE-N achieves similar area cost to generic NPU with same MAC number in INT8 format by dramatically smaller number of logic gates to support 16bit floating point format with no risk of quantization and fixed-point arithmetic error.

WAVE-N is a fully programmable processing core, and its v1.0.0, single core with below specification, is currently available for both commercialization and evaluation. For evaluation trial, especially with 3^rd party network/model, any party can consult with Chips&Media to obtain C-model and compiler under NDA.

About Chips&Media,Inc.

Chips&Media is a multimedia IP leader offering HW video codec IP, image processing NPU, lossless/lossy frame buffer compression IP & others. Since 2003, Chips&Media have exclusively focused on the HW video codec IP industry. Our video codec IP has powered over 3,000,000,000 units in the market, adopted by more than 150 semiconductor companies for their SoCs. Chips&Media's video codec IP supports all major and legacy formats from 1080p up to 8K 120fps, including HEVC/H.265, AVC/H.264, AV1, VP9, APV, VVC, JPEG & others. The recent introduction of our image processing NPU IP is transforming Chips&Media into a premium multimedia IP provider. It is custom NPU designed to work for imaging application at high-quality and high-resolution in edge devices. For more information, please visit our website at www.chipsnmedia.com