The joint efforts of imec and CEA-LETI underline Europe’s ambition to take a leading role in the development of these technologies and this increased collaboration will focus on developing, testing and experimenting neuromorphic and quantum computing – and should result in the delivery of a digital hardware computing toolbox that can be used by European industry partners to innovate in a wide variety of application domains – from personalised healthcare and smart mobility to the new manufacturing industry and smart energy sectors.
Edge Artificial Intelligence (eAI) commonly refers to computer systems that display intelligent behavior locally on the hardware devices (e.g chips). They analyse their environment and take the required actions to achieve specific goals.
Edge AI is poised to become a key driver of economic development. And, even more importantly perhaps, it holds the promise of solving many societal challenges – from treating diseases that cannot yet be cured today, to minimising the environmental impact of farming.
Decentralisation from the cloud to the edge is a key challenge of AI technologies applied to large heterogeneous systems. This requires innovation in the components industry with powerful, energy-guzzling processors.
“The ability to develop technologies such as AI and quantum computing – and put them into industrial use across a wide spectrum of applications – is one of Europe’s major challenges. Both quantum and neuromorphic computing (to enable artificial intelligence) are very promising areas of innovation, as they hold a huge industrialisation potential,” said Luc Van den hove, president and CEO of imec.
“A stronger collaboration in these domains between imec and CEA-Leti, two of Europe’s leading research centers, will undoubtedly help to speed up the technologies’ development time: it will provide us with the critical mass that is required to create more – and faster – impact, and will result in plenty of new business opportunities for our European industry partners.”
“Two European microelectronics pioneers today are joining forces to raise the game in both high-performance computing and trusted AI at the edge, and ultimately to fuel European industry success through innovations in aeronautics, defence, automobiles, Industry 4.0 and health care,” said Emmanuel Sabonnadière, Leti CEO. “This collaboration with imec following earlier innovation-collaboration agreements with the Fraunhofer Group for Microelectronics of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the largest organization for applied research, will focus all three institutes to the task of keeping Europe at the forefront of new digital hardware for AI, HPC and Cyber-security applications.”
Imec and CEA-Leti are inviting partners from industry as well as academia to join them and benefit from access to the research centers’ state-of-the-art technology with proven reproducibility – enabling a much higher degree of device complexity, reproducibility and material perfection while sharing the costs of precompetitive research.
