Jerry Petersen
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded a grant worth $18.6 million to Princeton University and technology company EnCharge AI, which have partnered on a multi-year project under DARPA’s Optimum Processing Technology Inside Memory Arrays program.
The $78 million OPTIMA program seeks to develop, using existing Very Large Scale Integration manufacturing, compute-in-memory accelerators that are fast, power-efficient and scalable for the handling of artificial intelligence workloads relevant to defense, EnCharge AI said Wednesday.
EnCharge is already commercializing a first-generation switched-capacitor analog in-memory computing chip. The partnership with Princeton will use the next generation version of that chip to explore advancements and end-to-end workload execution of AI applications.
The first-generation in-memory computing chip was developed by a lab at Princeton overseen by Naveen Verma, a professor of electrical and computer engineering.
Verma, who is also co-founder and CEO of EnCharge, said regarding the grant award that he and his organization “are excited for DARPA’s support in accelerating the next generation to see how far we can take performance and efficiency.”
Federal leaders and industry experts will tackle the transformative power of artificial intelligence at the Potomac Officers Club’s 5th Annual Artificial Intelligence Summit, which will take place on March 21. Register now to attend this important event!
