The Brainchip Holdings Ltd (ASX: BRN) share price is under pressure yet again on Friday.
In morning trade, the semiconductor company's shares are down 3% to 31.5 cents.
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Why is the Brainchip share price falling again?
Investors have been selling down the company's shares again on Friday amid broad market weakness which has overshadowed the release of an announcement.
That announcement reveals that Brainchip has added to its patent portfolio following the issue of an Australian patent.
The patent, AU 2022203607, was issued on 24 August by IP Australia. Management believes it is a valuable intellectual property asset that will block competitors from performing efficient transposed and dilated convolutions in a neural network.
The company advised that there are four key features to the patent. These are:
- It protects event-based transposed and dilated convolution techniques on digital input data converted into events. This approach significantly reduces the computational requirements and power consumption compared to non-event-based convolutions.
- The technology enables advanced edge application implementation by requiring a smaller number of event-based neuron circuits.
- The low power and efficiency advantages surpass existing state-of-the-art techniques, making it highly suitable for tasks such as semantic segmentation and super-resolution.
- The patented technology is in the advanced stages of development for integration into the Akida 2nd generation.
Management notes that this patent issue means that its portfolio now comprises 18 issued patents. In addition, approximately 30 patent applications are pending in the US, Europe, Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, India, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, and Israel.
While this might sound like a lot, it's trivial in comparison to the leading players in this highly competitive industry dominated by the big boys. Nvidia, for example, has a total of 11,214 patents globally.
I'm sure if Nvidia thought that Brainchip had something of worth, it would just acquire the company. After all, it would be pocket change for a company that spent over US$2 billion on research and development activities during the three months ended 30 June.
This latest decline means the Brainchip share price has lost 67% of its value over the last 12 months. It is also trading within a whisker of a new multi-year low. Short sellers will certainly be smiling into the weekend.
