Blueshift Memory won the ‘Most Innovative Memory Technology’ award
Blueshift Memory won the ‘Most Innovative Memory Technology’ award at the recent Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California, for its just-launched Cambridge Architecture, which was funded by an Innovate UK Smart grant.
Blueshift, which is based at the Hauser Forum, was founded in 2016 by VP IP & Legal Dr Audrey Stone and CTO/CEO Peter Marosan. Based at 3 Charles Babbage Road, the company was ‘Highly Commended’ in the Cambridge Independent’s 2023 Science & Technology Awards.
The company’s proprietary chip design 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 including AI, (AR/V), 5G edge connectivity and the IoT. Its Cambridge Architecture is next-generation technology for stored-programme machines, designed to replace the currently-used modified Harvard architecture and to overcome the traditional constraints of the von Neumann bottleneck.
Blueshift recently completed a 13-month R&D project to demonstrate the performance of its Cambridge Architecture, which has been developed to address the von Neumann Bottleneck – the phenomenon that data transfer between the core and the memory has become the limiting factor in computational speed. As computing tasks grow more data-hungry, Blueshift’s architecture overcomes a growing obstacle to computational efficiency, and also offers huge energy savings by eliminating unnecessary movement of data.
A paper was presented by Sarmad Adeel, senior embedded design engineer, at the Flash Memory Summit, describing the development of the RISC-V-based chip, and reporting the achievement of acceleration by a factor of 16 to 128 times for processing image data, along with ultra-low power consumption. When used in a security camera monitoring a rapidly-evolving active shooter situation, for example, the chip can enable real-time identification of different types of firearms to automatically trigger an alarm. This capability could be a game-changer and could potentially save many lives.
“This is the first time that Blueshift Memory’s technology has been demonstrated in a real-life application, and the results are extremely promising,” said Peter Marosan. “We know that in more challenging, data-intensive use cases like servers for high-frequency trading, the Cambridge Architecture is capable of even higher levels of acceleration, up to 1,000 times or more, and this is the first step towards us reaching that market. This high performance will also be accompanied by dramatic energy savings, since moving large amounts of data around unnecessarily makes excessive demands on energy consumption.”
Speaking of the award at the summit, Jay Kramer, chairman of the awards programme and president of Network Storage Advisors Inc, said: “Data transfer between core and memory has become the limiting factor in computational speed. AI and Big Data applications need to deal with large data sets, which only intensifies the need for a next-generation architecture.
“We are proud to recognise Blueshift Memory for the innovation of Cambridge Architecture. This technology provides a new level of computational efficiency with zero latency and up to 1,000 times faster memory access, while providing up to a 50 per cent reduction in energy consumption by eliminating unnecessary movement of data.”
Peter added: “It is an incredible accolade that the industry experts at the world’s largest memory show have selected Blueshift Memory for this award.” Helen Duncan, chief marketing officer of Blueshift Memory, said: “Our first Flash Memory Summit has been a huge success for the company. We have made some great connections among the delegates we’ve met here, and the quality of the technical presentations has been outstanding.”
