Aisin, a Toyota-affiliated automotive supplier, has collaborated with Tohoku University to develop the world's first 16nm AI SoC featuring integrated STT-MRAM. The chip utilizes a near-memory computing architecture, incorporating 32MB of embedded MRAM to store AI model weights and boot data directly on the silicon.
By eliminating the need to access external DRAM or SSD storage during startup, the SoC achieves a boot time of 65.7ms, which is 38.59 times faster than previous solutions. The design also incorporates an 8/16-bit hybrid multiplication architecture and weight-sharing technology to optimize performance for Tiny YOLOv3 object detection tasks.
The new chip demonstrates significant efficiency gains, with AI processing speeds increasing by 10.16 times and overall operational speed improving by 25.2 times. Furthermore, the energy consumption for object detection is reduced to 50.7mJ per frame, representing a 50-fold improvement in energy efficiency compared to traditional systems.
