New Electronics – Ceva and Edge Impulse partner to accelerate Edge AI app development

The two companies are working together to combine Ceva-NeuPro-Nano NPUs with Edge Impulse Platform support. This integration will enable AI developers to more quickly develop, train, and deploy advanced embedded ML applications for Ceva NPUs with turnkey performance before the physical hardware is available.

This first-of-its-kind collaboration around NPU IP enables AI developers to accurately benchmark and optimize the performance of edge AI models on the Edge Impulse Platform, accelerating time to market for AIoT devices targeting NeuPro-Nano-based silicon.

The Ceva-NeuPro-Nano NPU IP for Embedded AI is a highly efficient, self-contained Edge NPU family designed for embedded ML applications. It provides a balance between ultra-low power and best performance in a small footprint to efficiently execute embedded ML workloads across AIoT product categories such as Hearing Aids, Wearables, Home Audio, Smart Home, and Smart Factory.

Optimized for AIoT, these NPUs are suitable for Ceva’s large installed base of wireless customers and MCU vendors looking to integrate their AI/ML models into their product roadmaps to increase performance, support emerging Edge AI use cases, and enter new market segments.

The Edge Impulse Platform complements the NeuPro-Nano hardware, providing the customer with ‘no-code’ AI tools that significantly simplify the deployment and benchmarking of embedded ML applications.

“Ceva-NeuPro-Nano is an exciting new NPU IP core that will enable a wide range of embedded ML applications to run efficiently on small, low-power, high-performance edge devices,” said Zach Shelby, Co-Founder and CEO of Edge Impulse. “Our first-of-its-kind NPU IP collaboration with Ceva enables NeuPro-Nano customers to leverage the Edge Impulse Platform to unlock the full potential of pre-silicon embedded ML in AIoT products, facilitating rapid and scalable deployment of edge AI with unprecedented performance across industries and end markets.”

“We are in the early stages of the Edge AI era, and the demand for on-device AI is growing across every industry and market segment,” added Chad Lucien, vice president and general manager of the Sensors and Audio Business Unit at Ceva. “To meet the intense demand for low-power, small form factor, and powerful AIoT devices, our customers need a solution to efficiently and cost-effectively incorporate embedded ML applications into their NeuPro-Nano-based products. It is this combination that, together with the Edge Impulse Platform and NeuPro-Nano, provides AI developers with a seamless, user-friendly experience to rapidly design, develop, and deploy silicon-optimized AI applications with market-leading performance.”

With the Edge Impulse Platform, optimized AI performance can be achieved with little or no code for NeuPro-Nano NPUs. Models can be uploaded to or developed using the Edge Impulse Platform for faster development cycles and deployment on NeuPro-Nano.

Since NeuPro-Nano’s self-contained architecture supports AI inference, feature extraction, and DSP workloads commonly used in audio, video, and speech applications, the combination with the Edge Impulse Platform ensures developers have accurate cycle count emulation for end-to-end AI implementation.

The Ceva-NeuPro-Nano NPU IP is available for licensing today in two configurations to address a wide range of use cases. The Edge Impulse Platform will be available alongside Ceva-NeuPro-Nano in the coming months.