Smart Grant is a huge vote of support for Blueshift Memory’s Cambridge Architecture

Blueshift Memory, the innovator of a novel proprietary high-speed computer architecture, has announced that it has been selected to receive one of the prestigious Smart Grants awarded by Innovate UK (part of UK Research and Innovation) during early 2022.

The highly-competitive £25m Smart fund helps a group of UK SMEs to swiftly commercialise the best game-changing ideas, which are required to be genuinely new and novel as well as disruptive within their sector – and Blueshift’s memory architecture innovation is certainly that.

The focus of Blueshift Memory’s technology is the Cambridge Architecture, the next-generation technology for stored-program machines, designed to replace the modified Harvard architecture and to overcome the traditional constraints of the von Neumann bottleneck.

This bottleneck occurs in the communication between the host and the memory. Programmers worry about data structures, and write code that understands those structures. That understanding is lost when the code is compiled into assembler. The CPU calculates addresses and indexes in a random fashion, and each memory access is discrete.

This approach is power-hungry and inefficient. By adding back that understanding of data structure, the Cambridge Architecture optimises the memory architecture for more efficient handling of large data sets and time-critical data, enabling up to 1,000 times faster memory access for specific data-focused applications. These include high performance computing, AI, machine vision for augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), 5G edge connectivity and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Blueshift Memory’s Smart Grants 13-month project is entitled “Research on the application of a new generation memory architecture in computer vision AI solutions for IoT devices”. Its aim is to develop a next-generation computer vision (CV) application on edge devices for the IoT.

CV uses AI to enable the content of digital images to be analysed and interpreted by a computer in a similar way to how they are perceived by a human being, and to trigger actionable responses based on the results. This ability for computers to ‘see’ is crucial to solving a wide range of real-world problems in fields including robotics, Industry 4.0, Smart Cities and autonomous vehicles.

“By dramatically increasing memory access speed, the compact CV AI module we are developing will open up use cases such as onboard real-time scenario analysis in body-worn cameras,” said Peter Marosan, founder and CEO of Blueshift Memory. “It will also help us demonstrate the potential benefits of the Cambridge Architecture IP for larger system-on-chip designs for applications like high frequency trading and In-memory databases.”

“It is a great achievement for Blueshift Memory to have won a Smart Grant for this work, as it is a highly competitive selection procedure. Our project is one of only 71 out of a total of 1,072 applications that were successful in securing funding in this round,” he added.

The Cambridge Architecture will be demonstrated in the final FPGA (field-programmable gate array) design that is being developed under the Smart Grant project.