Aspinity, the Pittsburgh analogue machine learning IC specialist, is joining up with Infineon to bring together Aspinity’s  Reconfigurable Analogue Modular Processing (RAMP) technology with Infineon’s XENSIVTM sensor family.

Aspinity’s RAMP chip is an analogue machine learning chip that can analyse raw, unstructured analogue sensor data to determine which data are important at the start of the signal chain — introducing an architectural approach to system design that saves significant battery power in end devices.

Functioning like an intelligent gate keeper, the RAMP chip analyses analogue data from Infineon’s  XENSIVTM MEMS sensors to determine what is relevant.

The RAMP chip then triggers the ADC and downstream DSP or MCU to perform more complex analysis only on the relevant data, eliminating the power inefficiencies typical of other systems that waste power digitizing all of the data, relevant or not.

Since designers can easily programme a RAMP chip for application-specific inferencing, the combination of Aspinity’s RAMP chip with Infineon’s XENSIVTM sensors can facilitate a power-efficient analyse-first architecture in small, power- and data-efficient always-on devices.