A photonics-based chip.So why try to use light-based chips on a self-driving car, even just as an experiment? Since Lightmatter boasts that its chips are both faster and more efficient than a traditional chip, the idea here is that running the brains of a self-driving car with their chips could more efficiently use the limited electrical resources onboard an autonomous EV.
He says that their light-based chips will “serve as the brain for a buggy.” The entire experimental vehicle won’t run on light-based chips , but the part of the computing hub handling the AI would. That brain would probably operate “multiple neural nets that are running back-to-back,” he adds, helping the buggy figure out what its perception system is seeing and what the car should do next.
The company is not planning to actually create a car from scratch. “We’re just going to buy something off the shelf,” Harris says. “We’re not trying to innovate on anything to do with the car—it’s just the brain.” The light-based chips, in other words, could work as the central compute unit for a self-driving buggy or even a golf-cart-type contraption. The ultimate goal is that if that brain can do its AI-operations efficiently, then the self-driving buggy could do more with its batteries.
some of the initiative’s goals this way: “Examples of desirable outcomes for this program include the development of artificially intelligent navigation systems for Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles , hybrid analog/digital/photonic computation, and advanced diagnostics and tamper detection for microelectronic devices.” Lightmatter is just one team involved in the program. Other organizations, like General Electric and Purdue University, have also received funding from IARPA.
Did we achieve quantum computing already? It went by so quickly.