Semiconductor company BrainChip surged 20% on Tuesday, before closing over 11% higher despite the tech sector falling over 4%, after unveiling a new partnership deal.
The neuromorphic AI producer said it had secured a contract for radar signaling with Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), worth US$1.8 million (A$2.8 million).
The partnership falls under a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Contract, funded for a U.S. federal government program focused on research and development by small businesses, which aim to support government missions.
The program will develop algorithms based on BrainChip’s proprietary state space model algorithm framework, known as TENNs (Temporal Event Neural Network), and will be optimised to run on Akida 2.0 hardware.
BrainChip’s neuromorphic technology improves the cognitive communication capabilities on constrained platforms, used by military, spacecraft and robotics for commercial and government markets.
The agreement includes a $1.8 million contract amount that will be paid to BrainChip over a 12-month period, beginning in January 2025.
“Radar signaling processing will be implemented on multiple mobile platforms, so minimising system SWaP-C is critical,” said BrainChip chief executive Sean Hehir.
“This partnership to improve radar signaling applications for AFRL showcases how neuromorphic computing can achieve significant benefits of low-power, high-performance compute in the most mission-critical use cases.
“This award is a very strong endorsement from leading organisations such as Air Force Research Laboratory for our industry leading TENNs offering,” said Hehir.
BrainChip enables edge AI on-chip processing and learning, and the company’s first-to-market neuromorphic processor, AkidaTM, mimics the human brain to analyse only essential sensor inputs at the point of acquisition.
The company claims that by keeping machine learning local to the chip and independent of the cloud, it dramatically reduces latency, while also improving privacy and data security.
Edge devices with AI are predicted to be a US$70 billion market by 2025, and BrainChip is working to be the design standard in the future of edge compute.
BrainChip (ASX: BRN) closed 11.4% higher on Tuesday at $0.25 with a market cap of $472.75 million.