Prophesee, a Paris-based startup that has pioneered neuromorphic vision systems, presented this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco a new, stacked event-based vision sensor jointly developed with Sony Corp. Designed by Prophesee's event-driven technology, the new sensor was built on technologies engineered by Sony for advanced stacked CMOS image sensors. For event-driven systems, the new sensor offers the industry's smallest pixel size and the industry's highest high-dynamic range (HDR) performance, Prophesee claimed. The brain-inspired sensor would allow industrial machines, robots and autonomous vehicles to see and sense the environment better. The partnership could herald a new era in which AI -- both AI sensing and AI processing -- could take place very close to the sensor, if not yet on the sensor itself, where data is generated. Sony is the world's leading CMOS image sensor company.

When Apple CEO Tim Cook introduced the iPhone X, he claimed it would "set the path for technology for the next decade." While it is too early to tell, the neural engine used for face recognition was the first of its kind. Today deep neural networks are a reality, and neuromorphic appears to be the only practical path to make continuing progress in AI. Facing data bandwidth constraints and ever-rising computational requirements, sensing and computing must reinvent themselves by mimicking neurobiological architectures, claimed a recently published report by Yole Développement (Lyon, France). In an interview with EE Times, Pierre Cambou, Principal Analyst for Imaging at Yole, explained that neuromorphic sensing and computing could solve most of AI's current issues while opening new application perspectives in the next decades.