The traditional computing technology is struggling to keep up with the enormous amount of data processing capabilities and the bandwidth expectations. This has led to a need for a better computing technology being sought after by many industries. The Neuromorphic Chips can provide and stand up to these expectations, originally the brainchild of Carver Mead, the neuromorphic chips work on the basic idea of neural networks of brain and the tremendous data crunching capabilities it brings with it. The Neuromorphic technology has found its use in data analytics and machine learning and holds the promise of unsupervised machine learning. The fundamental functioning of neuromorphic chips depends on the pattern recognition and pattern learning to create the artificial neural networks and ultimately artificial intelligence.
The neuromorphic chips are a much sought after product due to its huge potential in limiting the computing restraints. The big data players like Facebook and Google are already handling these needs with similar traditional computers and chips. With the ever rising data processing needs, this market may rise eventually to take over the traditional platforms. Even today the chip market appears to be taking pace with some vendors shipping neuromorphic chips, whereas some are still struggling to do so.
The neuromorphic chip market is expected to increase in its worth at very fast rate with the commercialization of the chips in the consumer markets. The current bottleneck that appears to withhold the potential of these chips may hinder its progress in wide scale use for some forthcoming years.
Based on the functions that it caters to, the market of neuromorphic chips can be classified into signal processing, data mining, image processing and others. Of these the signal processing and the data mining application segment hold the largest dominion in the market due to its widespread applications such as in the defense, aerospace and industrial sector as well as the data analytics sector respectively. Yet it is expected that the signal processing application sector may grow at the highest rate amongst them as it find new usage and applications in various every day.
The segmentation of the neuromorphic chips on the basis of its applications provides us with aerospace, automotive, defense, medical and other sectors. The aerospace defense and military industries are expected to grow in upcoming years, but the consumer industry may still be the largest shareholder of the market. The adoption neuromorphic chips by many other industries and sectors may also increase in foreseeable future.
On the basis of basis of region the neuromorphic chip market can be divided into seven major zones, namely, North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East and Africa and Latin America. Of these the North America region holds the largest share of market fueled by the defense and aerospace industry requirements followed by the Asia Pacific region. The future demands of neuromorphic chips maybe fueled by Internet of Things and hence the Asia Pacific region holds a great promise for the market growth. Country wise, the United States, China, Germany and South Korea are expected to be the major markets and also may witness large amount of compound growth.
Some of the key players in the neuromorphic market are, Intel Corp. (U.S.), International Business Machine Corporation (U.S), Qualcomm Inc.(U.S), Hewlett Packard Corp.(U.S), Lockheed Martin Corporation (U.S), General Vision Inc.(U.S), Brain Corporation (U.S), HRL Laboratories LLC (U.S), Vicarious FPC Inc.(U.S) among others.
The leading organizations in the market have adopted various strategies to gain ground in this race and gain a competetive advantage like, partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, new product launches.
IBM has come up with a product named TrueNorth with a million strong neurons and 4096 core processors in the year 2016, that simulates the way a brain functions and is one of its kind.
General Vision has licensed its Intellectual property rights to Intel Inc. for the production of its Curie Module. It features a 32-bit Quark processor with General Vision’s pattern matching intellectual property. This may bring out neuromorphic chips in broader markets like fitness trackers and other wearables.
Qualcomm Inc. is developing its Zeroth platform, a cognitive computing and machine learning platform. This platform being developed from 2014 has already enabled the making of Snapdragon 820, the ultimate GPU with Kryo core architecture that may increase performance higher than 40% and is awaited commercialization.
