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Phỏng vấn CEO: Doug Smith của Veevx

Tháng Chín 28, 2024 The Art Of Semi 0 Comments

Veevx DouglasSmith Picture

Douglas Smith has focused his career on optimizing advanced technologies for high volume ASIC applications. He has led elite design teams at Motorola SPS then Broadcom for over 25 years. With 200+ successful tape outs generating $10B+ in revenue. Douglas left Broadcom to self-fund a startup focused on advanced memory technologies. He has assembled an elite design and business team to provide differentiated memory solutions to his customers.

Tell us about your company

Veevx is a fabless semiconductor company created by a veteran team of engineering architects that left Broadcom’s central engineering group to form a company focused on technology innovations to build products for the market needs. We were founded 2.5 years ago in Mesa, AZ with 20 people split between the US and India.

What problems are you solving?

Our products bring cloud level AI performance to mobile and edge devices. Processing typically performed in the cloud can be done directly on a mobile or edge devices allowing end users to do translations, AI assistance, VR & AR functions locally. This provides low latency, user tailored experience, privacy with longer battery life & higher security, giving better user experience.

We also provide technology to overcome the memory wall. AI functionally is driving the demand for high performance local memory (SRAM). The manufacturing processes and limitations imposed by device physics restricts SRAM scaling as CMOS nodes shrink. This increases memory costs.

Customers want advances in memory technology to overcome the limitations of SRAM. We will soon sample our iRAM to customers. iRAM is an advanced memory chiplet that is packaged with our customers’ microcontroller. It gives their devices more memory, in the same footprint, at significant power savings.

How do you enable your customers?

We are focused on mobile and low power edge devices. Our product enables end customers to perform rich AI functions, typically done in the data center, on the devices. This eliminates the latency of going to the data center, enhances privacy because the data stays on device and in some cases, reduces cost and power.

How do you differentiate from others in this arena?

Veevx specializes in new memory technology and mixed signal compute. Many academic and R&D papers discuss the advantages of compute in memory and how mixed signal compute is required to reduce the processing power while also increasing the performance for AI accelerators. Our team has decades of experience productizing new technology into silicon and specializes in the area needed for an ultra-low power AI accelerator compute product.

What new features/technology are you working on?

High-performance/Ultra-low power compute by integrating mixed signal compute directly into the memory architecture. We take ultra-low power MRAM and add innovations to increase the performance of the memory cells while adding innovative mixed signal compute to our silicon verified ultra-low power MRAM to maximize the compute in memory performance and energy efficiency. Our solution mitigates the power and latency by avoiding data movement to the processor. Our mixed signal compute is flexible to perform the mathematical operations used in AI using 1/100 the power of traditional digital compute engines. We want to keep our accelerator flexible so as models continue to evolve, we will be able to run the operations on our accelerator.

Can you tell us about your experience of being a Silicon Catalyst incubator company?

Being a Silicon Catalyst portfolio company for the past year and a half has been an invaluable experience for us. The incubator has accelerated our development by providing essential tools and foundry access through their in-kind partnerships resources that are often out of reach for startups.

They have offered us a platform to showcase our products and innovations to a wide industry audience, which has been instrumental in increasing our visibility and credibility in the market.

Moreover, Silicon Catalyst’s extensive network of experienced advisors, relevant investors, and collaborative customers has opened doors to new opportunities and partnerships. This support system has not only enhanced our technological capabilities but also propelled our business growth.