The GAP9, GreenWaves Technologies latest IoT application processor -- which is being fabbed on GlobalFoundries 22FDX (FD-SOI) technology -- will be sampling in the first half of 2020, according to EETimes (read the whole article here). Mass production is slated for 2021. Greenwaves (which has been an SOI Consortium member for several years now) is a fabless semiconductor startup designing disruptive ultra-low power embedded solutions for AI processing in sensing devices at the very edge.
GreenWaves marketing director Martin Croome told EETimes, “We are using the body biasing ability in FD-SOI to allow us to achieve even lower power consumption.” Compared to GreenWaves’ currently shipping product, GAP8 (which is on a 55nm bulk process), GAP9 reduces energy consumption by 5 times while enabling inference on neural networks 10 times larger. This is thanks to architectural enhancements and the move to GF's 22FDX semiconductor process.
The new chip delivers a peak cluster memory bandwidth of 41.6 GB/sec and up to 50 GOPS combined compute power at an overall power consumption of 50mW. It enables customers to embed machine learning and signal processing capabilities into battery operated or energy harvesting devices such as IoT sensors in smart building, consumer and industrial markets and consumer and medical wearable devices. GAP9 was showcased at the last RISC-V Summit in San Jose (read the full press release here).
[caption id="attachment_29061" align="alignnone" width="400"] GAP9 Block diagram (Courtesy: GreenWaves)[/caption]
Some of the (many!) features include:
10 identical high performance, extended ISA, RISC-V ISA cores (cluster of 9 cores for compute-intensive tasks and a fabric controller core for control and communication)
Dynamic voltage frequency scaling and automatic body biasing
Multiple power states: deep sleep, deep sleep with retentive RAM, low activity, SOC on, SOC on cluster on
Click here for a full GAP9 product brief.
