French IP developer Dolphin Design has teamed up with Sonical in the US on the design of a platform for the next generation of chips and operating system for hearables such as headphones and hearing aids.
The two companies are developing a heterogeneous computing platform using Dolphin’s AI accelerators based on the RISC-V open instruction set and Sonical’s CosmOS operating system.
The processing IP provided by Dolphin Design, a subsidiary of materials firm Soitec since 2018, includes the Raptor convolutional nueral network (CNN) accelerator and Panther, a software programmable RISC-V-based AI/DSP accelerator. These both use near-memory computing and parallel processing o provide the energy efficiency needed for hearable designs.
CosmOS supports a range of plugins and apps for headsets, earbuds and hearing aids for Headphone 3.0, which uses an ear computer and operating system to easily customise the audio experience.