Chip-maker AMD India has partnered with the Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, an incubator at IIT-Bombay, "to foster innovation in the field of semiconductors and advance development of energy-efficient spiking neural network chips in the country".

Under the partnership, AMD will provide grants to the startups incubated out of IIT-Bombay working on reducing the energy consumption of traditional neural networks. "We target a 30x improvement in energy efficiency on AMD processors and accelerators that will power HPC and AI training by 2025", said Jaya Jagadish, Country Head of AMD India. She added that AMD was committed to collaboration with both industry bodies and academia for innovation.

The first grant has been given to Numelo Technologies for developing SNN chips using Ultra-Low Power Quantum Tunneling on SOI technology. "This industry is characterized by high costs and long design cycles, so it is very important to nurture product-focused startups in Semiconductor Design", said Shaji Varghese, CEO, SINE-IIT Bombay.

In addition, this will be in line with India's comprehensive semiconductor strategy building and growing startups in this critical space. The collaboration will further underline including quality education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and promotion of scientific research as part of its corporate social responsibility (CSR) programme.

By doing this, AMD and IIT-Bombay work together to nurture such innovative startups and, in the process, take semiconductor technology in India one step ahead by filling up those gaps that exist in the industry and contributing to its fast-growing semiconductor ecosystem.