- 01EMASS receives first 16nm ECS-DoT silicon from TSMC.
- 0216nm joins 22nm ECS-DoT in a two-node family.
- 03Benchmarking underway; silicon data to be published.
Nanoveu (ASX: NVU) has confirmed that subsidiary company Embedded AI Systems (EMASS) has received the first engineering samples of its next-generation 16 nanometer ECS-DoT edge system-on-chip from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).
Built on TSMC’s 16nm fin field effect transistor (FinFET) process, the 16nm ECS-DoT sits alongside the commercially available 22nm ECS-DoT, giving EMASS a two-node product family running a common software toolchain and programming model.
The chip retains the RISC-V core, dual deep-learning accelerators, scalable compute-to-memory interconnect and ‘always on’ design philosophy of the 22nm generation with the inclusion of a fully integrated bluetooth low-energy subsystem with on-chip analog and radio frequency (RF), expanded on-chip static random access memory, a new finegrained power management fabric, patented object detection accelerator, and the first hardware floating point unit (FPU) in the ECS-DoT family.
Moving to FinFET is expected to bring higher logic density, lower leakage, and more headroom for on-chip integration and allowed EMASS to place a full radio, larger memory array and additional accelerators on the same die while retaining the power budget that the ECS-DoT family was designed around.
Performance Benchmarking
The EMASS engineering team now plans to lead the sample batch through a structured program including powering the chip, establishing communication, and confirming that core functions behave as designed.
Performance benchmarking and RF characterisation will follow, after which the company will publish a summary of the measured power and performance of the 16nm ECS-DoT based on silicon test data.
EMASS will make engineering samples and evaluation boards available to select customers and partners.
The company continues to evaluate smaller process nodes for future generations of ECS-DoT and intends to remain at the front of the category in bringing ‘always on’ intelligence onto more advanced silicon.
Major Technical Milestone
Nanoveu director and EMASS founder Dr Mohamed Sabry said receipt of first silicon was a major technical milestone for the company.
“There is a particular moment in every chip program when the first parts come back from the fab and you can hold what was, until then, a set of files,” he said.
“We have reached that moment with the 16nm ECS-DoT—it carries everything we set out to build […] on one die at 16nm.”
“Now the real work starts, of measuring it and reporting what the silicon tells us.”
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