Ceva and Edge Impulse Collaboration Accelerates AIoT Adoption

Ceva, a leading licensor of silicon and software IP that enables smart edge devices to connect, sense, and infer data more reliably and efficiently, and Edge Impulse, a leading platform for building, deploying, and scaling machine learning models at the edge, announced a collaboration to enhance the Ceva-NeuPro-Nano NPU to support the Edge Impulse platform. This integration will enable AI developers to more quickly develop, train, and deploy advanced embedded ML applications on Ceva NPUs with cycle-accurate performance before physical hardware is available. This first-of-its-kind collaboration based on NPU IP provides AI developers with the ability to accurately test and refine the performance of their AI models at the edge on the Edge Impulse platform, significantly accelerating time to market for AIoT devices based on NeuPro-Nano silicon.

The Ceva-NeuPro-Nano NPU IP for Embedded AI is a high-performance, self-contained Edge NPU family designed for embedded ML applications. It provides an optimal balance of ultra-low power consumption and best-in-class performance in a small footprint to efficiently execute embedded ML workloads across AIoT product categories including Hearables, Wearables, Home Audio, Smart Home, Smart Factory, and more. These AIoT-optimized NPUs are ideal for Ceva’s large installed base of wireless customers and MCU vendors looking to integrate their own AI/ML models into their product roadmaps to increase performance, support new Edge AI use cases, and enter new market segments. The Edge Impulse platform perfectly complements NeuPro-Nano hardware by providing customers with “no-code” AI tools that radically simplify the deployment and benchmarking of embedded ML applications.

Artificial Intelligence for Operational Efficiency

With the Edge Impulse platform, optimized AI performance can be achieved for NeuPro-Nano NPUs with little or no code. Models can be uploaded or developed using the Edge Impulse platform to accelerate development and deployment cycles on NeuPro-Nano. Because NeuPro-Nano’s self-contained architecture uniquely supports AI inference, feature extraction, and DSP workloads commonly used in audio, voice, and visual applications, the Edge Impulse platform provides developers with accurate cycle count emulation for a complete AI application from start to finish.

Ceva-NeuPro-Nano NPU IP is available for licensing today in two highly efficient and optimized configurations to address a wide range of use cases. The Edge Impulse platform will be available for use with Ceva-NeuPro-Nano in the coming months.

Zach Shelby, Co-Founder and CEO of Edge Impulse

Ceva-NeuPro-Nano is an exciting new NPU IP core that will enable a wide range of embedded ML applications to run efficiently on small, power-efficient, and powerful edge devices. Our first-of-its-kind NPU IP collaboration with Ceva enables NeuPro-Nano customers to leverage the Edge Impulse platform to unlock the full potential of embedded ML in their AIoT products before silicon, facilitating rapid, scalable deployment of edge AI across industries and target markets with unprecedented performance.

Chad Lucien, Vice President and General Manager, Sensors and Audio Business Unit, Ceva

We are in the early stages of the Edge AI era, and demand for AI on devices is growing across every industry and market segment. To meet the critical demand for energy-efficient, small, and powerful AIoT devices, our customers need a solution that allows them to efficiently and cost-effectively incorporate embedded ML applications into their NeuPro-Nano-based products. The Edge Impulse platform with NeuPro-Nano is a winning combination, providing AI developers with a seamless, user-friendly environment to rapidly design, develop, and deploy silicon-optimized AI applications with market-leading performance.