Renesas Electronics Corporation has announced a strategic partnership with EdgeCortix, a Japan-based edge artificial intelligence (AI) fabless semiconductor development and design company. In conjunction with the strategic collaboration, Renesas has invested in EdgeCortix’s most recent funding round. Through both the investment and the partnership, this relationship will provide Renesas with unique access to EdgeCortix’s industry-leading technology.

Specifically, EdgeCortix is a start-up founded on the idea of creating a high-speed, low-power, AI-focused processor with a software-first approach for edge applications. The company’s suite of proprietary software and AI chip products accelerate AI inference tasks at very low power with low latency. EdgeCortix has brought three products to market. These include MERA, its multiple hardware platform compatible compiler software framework; Dynamic Neural Accelerator (DNA), its scalable, run-time reconfigurable neural network processor intellectual property (IP); and the power-efficient SAKURA AI co-processor device. Collectively, these form an integrated solution, especially suited for real-time edge AI. EdgeCortix’s solutions can deliver up to 50× better energy efficiency and 10× better performance/TOPS versus conventional GPUs and CPUs.

For its part, Renesas has staked a leadership position in edge and endpoint AI. It boasts the industry’s widest offering of embedded computing solutions. Also, its Reality AI Software and a larger number of internal and partner solutions for AI in industrial, smart home, automotive, and other applications complement these solutions. Partnering with EdgeCortix will support Renesas in streamlining and unifying its overall AI/ML (Machine Learning) developer experience across its entire MCU and MPU portfolio. Also, it will enable a seamless back-end layer for compilation that supports heterogeneous architectures.

“Renesas saw the potential for AI/ML at the edge and endpoint very early on, and we have moved swiftly to solidify our position in this fast-growing segment,” said Sailesh Chittipeddi, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Renesas’ Embedded Processing, Digital Power and Signal Chain Solutions Group. “The combination of our embedded processors and Reality AI Software along with EdgeCortix solutions will enable our customers to seamlessly compile their AI code with support for heterogeneous architectures, reducing their development risk, time and cost.”

Working with EdgeCortix provides Renesas the ability to leverage its existing IP and hardware, while simultaneously tapping into EdgeCortix’s expertise in key technology areas, including Apache TVM1, compiler development as well as heterogeneous framework design. This partnership also enables Renesas to access specialized hardware expertise that EdgeCortix has developed leveraging Arm as well as multiple other architectures including Renesas’ DRP-AI accelerator.

“We are delighted to grow and enhance our current strategic collaboration with an industry leader that also shares our vision and enthusiasm for the vast potential of supporting energy-efficient AI/ML applications at the edge,” said Sakyasingha Dasgupta, Founder and CEO of EdgeCortix. “We are confident that both companies will benefit from this relationship, however, the real winners will be our collective customers.”