One of the best performers on the Australian share market on Wednesday has been the BrainChip Holdings Ltd (ASX: BRN) share price.
In morning trade the leading provider of low power, high performance edge AI technology using neuromorphic circuits has seen its share price rocket 139% higher to 10.5 cents.
Why did BrainChip's shares zoom higher?
Investors have been buying the company's shares this morning in response to an announcement released after the market close on Tuesday.
According to that release, the company has made its Akida Neural Processing Core (NPC) available for licensing. Management believes this introduction marks a major development in the company's market presence.
The release explains that the Akida NPC is now available to license as an intellectual property block for incorporation into Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) provided by semiconductor suppliers developing Artificial Intelligence enabled edge devices.
Applications at the edge include intelligent environmental controls, driver safety monitoring, vehicle safety and preventative maintenance, medical image classification, wearable health monitors, retail item recognition, access control, the industrial Internet of Things. and acoustic analysis.
What is the Akida NPC?
The update explains that the Akida NPC is a first of its kind solution for ASIC integration and provides unprecedented performance, configurability, low power and small size.
This is important as the need for a low power, high performance neural network to incorporate artificial intelligence into ASICs is a pressing concern for suppliers targeting edge applications. As a result, it represents a large and growing opportunity for the company.
BrainChip's founder and CTO, Peter van der Made, was pleased with the development and the opportunity the company has.
He said: "From the start, our goal has been to build a revolutionary integrated circuit which brings artificial intelligence to edge devices, and to provide our intellectual property on a licensed basis to the world. The small size, high performance, low power and reconfigurable nature of the Akida IP provides ASIC integrators with a unique solution for incorporation into their products over multiple generations and serves to improve their ASIC performance. I believe that we have the right solution at the right time. The market is ready for Artificial Intelligence in edge devices."