Spiking Neuron Adaptive Processor (SNAP) is a technology that consists of many custom-designed cores that operate in parallel, making it significantly faster than software neural networks that run on a CPU or a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). This new technology has the ability to learn autonomously, evolve and associate information just like the human brain.
SNAP also implements learning rules in hardware, enabling Autonomous Features Extraction (AFE) directly from input data without the need for any software processing.
What makes our technology exciting is that it learns from experience, autonomously like a human learns. It does not need to be trained with millions of samples like Deep Learning, it learns in seconds. Deep Learning networks need a power-hungry and huge supercomputer to train, and training takes days to weeks. BrainChip SNAP learns by itself, without specific training, and finds patterns in the input stream that humans may not be aware of.
The neurons we have developed autonomously learn through a process known as STDP (Synaptic Time Dependent Plasticity). Our fully digital neurons process input spikes directly in hardware and are all updated in parallel, which means that the response time of the network is independent of the network size. Sensory neurons convert physical stimuli into spikes. Learning occurs when the input is intense, or repeating through feedback at each neuron and this is directly correlated to the way the brain learns.
SNAP operates completely in parallel with no dependence on software, which gives it its speed advantage.