LONDON — Smart wearable device firm Huami has further increased its stake in the RISC-V ecosystem, leading a €7 million (about $7.96 million) series A investment along with Soitec into GreenWaves Technologies, developer of a low-power internet of things (IoT) applications processor for intelligent sensors.

GreenWaves' GAP8 processor was launched a year ago. The company says that more than 300 development boards have been sold to date, with multiple customer designs in progress.

In an interview with EE Times, co-founder and CEO Loic Lietar said that he expects to have between five and 10 customers in production with GreenWaves' first-generation chip by the end of this year. He said that although they have sold a large number of development boards, it’s often difficult to pinpoint where each one is in the design cycle. But he expects that first products using its RISC-V–based IoT intelligent processor are likely to be in smart wearables (not wrist-worn), toys, robotics, and in smart buildings applications for people-counting activity.

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He emphasized that there are no real killer apps for ultra-low-power artificial intelligence (AI) processors because the market opportunities are so diverse. The GAP8 processor is suitable for IoT and consumer battery-operated applications including consumer and medical wearables, people and objects counting, machine health monitoring, home surveillance, voice control, face detection and recognition, consumer robotics, autonomous micro-drones, and smart toys.

GreenWaves claims that its processor has a unique combination of best-in-class attributes to serve battery-operated AI use cases, including energy efficiency that enables machine-learning inference computing at power consumption levels compatible with years of battery-powered operation; ultra-fast wakeup, low standby power consumption, and dynamically adjustable frequency and voltage to consume energy only when required; and fully programmable regular RISC-V/PULP parallel architecture to cope with rapidly evolving state of the art in machine-learning algorithms.

The latest investment will be deployed to complete the development of GreenWaves’ second-generation product, which will enable another “quantitative and qualitative leap” in the capabilities offered by intelligent, battery-powered edge devices, according to the company. Lietar told us that the first generation was developed for a mature TSMC 55LP technology to minimize execution risk. He said that after talking to customers, the next generation will look at improvements in memory and architecture innovation to deal with far more complex neural networks.

GreeWaves' GAP8 hierarchical architecture.

With this investment, Grenoble-based GreenWaves has raised a total of €14.6 million ($16.6 million). It raised a seed round of €3.1 million in two tranches from Soitec in 2017 and 2018 and also €4.5 million of non-diluted money in the form of grants, loans, and R&D tax credits.

Huami, a Chinese company established in 2013, listed on the New York Stock Exchange last year, raising about $110 million. It shipped 18.1 million smart wearable devices in 2017 and claims to have one of the largest biometric and activity databases in smart wearables, being a sole partner to Xiaomi. The company has been investing heavily in the RISC-V ecosystem and was part of the $50 million funding round in SiFive last April.

Huami itself claims to have developed the world’s first RISC-V–based AI-powered wearable chipset in September 2018, the Huangshan-1 AI chip. The chip incorporates four specialized core AI engines for heart biometrics, ECG, ECG Pro, and arrhythmia. It utilizes what the company calls its self-developed always-on (AON) technology, which can automatically transfer sensor data to the smart wearable’s SRAM inside the chip while making data storage faster and more stable. In addition, the neural network’s acceleration module can compute AI tasks locally (offline).

We asked Lietar whether Huami’s investment was part of a strategy to use GreenWaves’ processor in its wearables. He responded, saying that there were no strings attached between the investment decision and business.

“GreenWaves’ GAP8 and strong product roadmap has set the bar for delivering energy efficiency for high-performance signal-processing and machine-learning inference algorithms on edge devices, including wearables. We see a wide range of use cases for GAP8 processor that will transform IoT computing,” said Wang Huang, Huami’s CEO, in a press statement. “This investment will also strengthen our portfolio in the RISC-V ecosystem.”