BrainChip has announced the commercial availability and initial production shipments of its Akida AKD1500 reference chips. Production quantities of the AKD1500 are currently shipping to customers while the chip undergoes comprehensive industrial and military-grade qualification.
The AKD1500 was manufactured in partnership with GlobalFoundries using their 22nm Fully Depleted Silicon-on-Insulator (22FDX) technology. It is designed for sub-watt continuous inferencing at the digital edge and functions as a standalone processor or hardware co-processor.
The device processes data only when events occur, avoiding always-on energy consumption of traditional AI accelerators. It achieves near-terabyte operations-per-second (TOPS) scale efficiency while consuming less than 300mW in PCIe mode and under 200mW in serial mode.
Production Shipments and Qualification
Customers have begun receiving production-volume quantities for defense and wearable applications. The AKD1500 will undergo rigorous qualification testing for extreme thermal and environmental screening tiers required by customers.
The chip is available in two formats: standard packaged silicon for high-reliability circuit boards and bare die for direct-to-substrate integration in space-constrained or custom multi-chip modules. These options support deployment in demanding conditions involving shock, vibration, and temperature extremes for industrial IoT, automotive, aerospace, and defense uses.
Dual-Interface Design
The AKD1500 features a flexible interconnect architecture with PCIe interface for high-performance edge systems, compatible with x86, ARM, or RISC-V processors, and serial interfaces for low-power, battery-constrained embedded systems. This allows integration into existing hardware for pattern recognition and local learning, including with low-cost microcontrollers.
“The commercial availability of the AKD1500 production chip marks a profound milestone in our commercialization roadmap,” said Sean Hehir, CEO at BrainChip. “By delivering true, sub-watt neuromorphic compute in both packaged and die formats, we are providing industrial and defense partners with the rugged hardware flexibility they need to deploy intelligence anywhere completely free from cloud dependence.”
