neural-processing-unit
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DEEPX
DEEPX is a South Korean fabless semiconductor startup building ultra-low-power neural processing units (NPUs) for on-device and edge AI. Founded in 2018 by former Apple chip designer Lokwon Kim, the company designs AI accelerators - led by its 25 TOPS DX-M1 chip - that run vision and generative AI models at under 5 watts, aiming to move intelligence out of the data center and into robots, cameras, factories, mobility and everyday devices. It raised an $80.5M Series C in 2024 at a $529M valuation and positions itself as a 'Physical AI infrastructure company.'
Quadric
Quadric is a semiconductor IP company that licenses the Chimera family of general-purpose neural processing units (GPNPUs) - a single, fully C++ programmable processor core that runs machine learning inference alongside classic DSP and control code in one unified architecture. Founded in 2016 by three engineers who previously built bitcoin computing hardware, Quadric aims to fix the fragmentation of on-device AI silicon: instead of a fixed-function neural accelerator that breaks whenever a new model appears, its cores scale from 1 to 864 TOPS and can adopt new networks - including large language models up to 30 billion parameters - through a software port rather than a chip respin.