About REBECCA

The REBECCA project is an SME-driven initiative that aims to democratize the development of edge AI systems. It will create a complete hardware and software stack centered around a RISC-V CPU, which will offer significantly higher performance, energy efficiency, safety, and security than existing systems. This will be achieved by utilizing state-of-the-art technologies and making significant advances in processing units, hardware accelerators, reconfigurable hardware, and AI libraries and frameworks. The project will demonstrate its approach on four real-world use cases and two benchmarks from various domains. It will develop a novel chip comprising two tightly-coupled chiplets with features such as RISC-V multicore, Neuromorphic AI Accelerator, and Memory Encryption.

Ambition

The project will develop efficient edge-AI systems that can overcome the physical limitations of edge devices and meet regulations and constraints in numerous distinct application domains. This will involve designing and developing hardware, software, and middleware to accelerate computation-intensive parts of AI and conventional applications, ensure deterministic response times, and satisfy safety constraints. The project aims to enhance European strategic autonomy and sovereignty by using an open, royalty-free CPU architecture (i.e., RISC-V) and address performance safety and security concerns associated with IoT and edge devices.

Technical/Research Approach

To achieve its Ambition REBECCA will be the first edge-AI system utilizing a single, purely made-in-Europe, chip consisting of tightly coupled chiplets and reconfigurable devices containing the following advanced components:

● RISC-V multicore

● Neuromorphic AI Accelerator

● Programmable array AI Accelerator

● AI Accelerator utilizing a hierarchical processing architecture

● DNN Accelerator

● Reconfigurable hardware

● Near-Memory-Processing