Imagination sets up research division for IP
Imagination Technologies has launched a specialist division to bring together its research and develop underlying technology for next generation chip designs.
IMG Labs aims to understand and accelerate future trends in the semiconductor industry, translating these into new licensable technologies that will enable world-leading products for Imagination’s partners. The initial focus is on AI, GPU, heterogeneous compute and ray tracing.
“IMG Labs is Imagination doubling down on what it does best, core R&D for new technology that our customers want and need,” said Tim Mamtora, the new Chief of Innovation at Imagination Technologies who will lead the division. “The creation of Labs further demonstrates our long-standing commitment to developing commercial IP products that offer unique differentiation for customers. It enables our partners to be first to market with cutting-edge solutions and the exceptional quality that they have come to expect.”
One example of the work of the labs is what it calls Reduced Operation Set Computing (ROSC). This aims to make use of spare cycles in an AI accelerator to handle CPU tasks by converting the sequential instructions into graph instructions. This reduces the power consumption as data does not have to be transferred to the CPU.
Mamtora joins Imagination’s executive management team having spent over 14 years at Broadcom. “Heterogeneous compute is a key element of Imagination’s strategy going forward and a strong focus for IMG Labs,” he said. “Increasingly our customers want to accelerate a variety of workloads with flexible arrays of processors, all the while operating within challenging power and bandwidth budgets. With a rich portfolio of processor IP, and highly-skilled research teams, Imagination is in a unique position to bring novel solutions to market and deliver clear system differentiation.”
Senior members of the IMG Labs team include serial inventor Simon Fenney, Research Fellow, author or co-author of over 50 patents in the field of rendering hardware, texture and image compression, and mathematical operations, alongside Clifford Gibson, VP GPU Architecture; Steve Mackenzie, VP Systems and SoC Architecture; and Alex Pim, VP of AI Research and Architecture who leads on applied AI and high- performance computing.
“IMG Labs is comprised of some of the brightest minds at Imagination and continues to grow its pool of world-class engineers across a spectrum of disciplines from graphics and multimedia to AI and neural network acceleration,” said Mamtora.
A key part of IMG Labs is Strategic Technology Research, a cross-functional horizon-scanning initiative to anticipate trends and identify disruptive innovations for more detailed investigation. Second-level research groups contextualise these trends, establishing how to harness the value of new technologies to meet future customer needs.
With 18 patents filed in relation to the IMG Series4 neural network accelerator (NNA), IMG Labs will aim to drive patented designs directly into the engineering group, allowing them to deliver unique, high-quality, and award-winning products. With more than 15 years of experience and over 250 patents filed in ray tracing, Imagination is also looking to commercialise the technology alongside its AI expertise.
www.imaginationtech.com
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