IBM Research introduced a mixed-signal analog AI chip for running a variety of deep neural network (DNN) inference tasks.
The device has been tested to be as adept at computer vision AI tasks as digital counterparts, while being considerably more energy efficient.
The chip was fabricated in IBM’s Albany NanoTech Complex, and is composed of 64 analog in-memory compute cores (or tiles), each of which contains 256-by-256 crossbar array of synaptic unit cells. Compact, time-based analog-to-digital converters are integrated in each tile to transition between the analog and digital worlds. Each tile is also integrated with lightweight digital processing units that perform simple nonlinear neuronal activation functions and scaling operations.
The chip also has digital communication pathways at the chip interconnects of all the tiles and the global digital processing unit.
