It was a big deal two and a half years ago when researchers shrunk down an image-recognition program to fit onto a $5 computer the size of a candy bar -- and now it's an even bigger deal for Xnor.ai to re-engineer its artificial intelligence software to fit onto a solar-powered computer chip. "To us, this is as big as when somebody invented a light bulb," Xnor.ai's co-founder, Ali Farhadi, said at the company's Seattle headquarters. Like the candy-bar-sized, Raspberry Pi-powered contraption, the camera-equipped chip flashes a signal when it sees a person standing in front of it. The point is that Xnor.ai has figured out how to blend stand-alone, solar-powered hardware and edge-based AI to turn its vision of "artificial intelligence at your fingertips" into a reality. "This is a key technology milestone, not a product," Farhadi explained.

Addressing the "memory wall" and pushing for a new architectural solution enabling highly efficient performance computing for rapidly growing artificial intelligence (AI) applications are key areas of focus for Leti, the French technology research institute of CEA Tech. Speaking to EE Times at Leti's annual innovation conference here, Leti CEO Emmanuel Sabonnadière said there needs to be a highly integrated and holistic approach to moving AI from software and the cloud into an embedded chip at the edge. "We really need something at the edge, with a different architecture that is more than just CMOS, but is structurally integrated into the system, and enable autonomy from the cloud -- for example for autonomous vehicles, you need independence of the cloud as much as possible," Sabonnadière said. He commented on the Qualcomm bid for NXP being a key pointer as a driver for more computing at the edge. "Why do you think Qualcomm is buying NXP? It's for the sensing, and to put digital behind the sensing."