In a bid to make inroads into the industrial IoT, Synaptics is this month going into production with the first silicon in a planned family of ultra-low-power chips, called Katana, a name for a type of samurai sword. The big problem that Synaptics and Eta are trying to solve is making really, really low-power chips that can support applications written in machine learning frameworks such as Google's TensorFlow.
"Areas where we are differentiating is in low-power for voice and audio neural network operation, and this hybrid platform that will do both audio and image processing at micro-watts of power." Competitors' parts, contended Ganju, tend to handle only image or audio processing, not both.