SBIR/STTR Research Award

Hokkien Low Density Language Capability

Award identifier 1cc2f6a45b5c185418e11848d3c3b19ced0d1ee2a3c9f2b5eb3bc369cb92bd75Awarding agency Department of Defense · Special Operations Command

Award amount

$174,965

Program and phase

SBIR · Phase I

Award year

2023

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Award details

Awarding agency
Department of Defense
Branch
Special Operations Command
Recipient company
FEMTOSENSE, INC.
Proposal award date
2023-08-29
Contract end date
2024-04-01
UEI
K9TJHBLAPAA3
Solicitation number
23.2
Topic code
SOCOM232-002

Research abstract

Femtosense is an innovative tech startup leading the charge to deploy sparse AI using novel techniques that are far more affordable and easier to implement than traditional AI computational technologies. Femtosense’s invention – the Sparse Processing Unit (SPU-001) is a TRL level 7 processing chip poised to disrupt the $50B AI hardware market. It offers best-in-class SWaP-C (Size, Weight, Power, and Cost) tradeoffs and can enable applications other accelerators cannot thanks to first class support for sparse neural networks. Running sparse neural networks, as opposed to dense ones, boasts a 10x reduction in required memory and 100x reduction in power, with a minimal or negligible drop in accuracy. Femtosense designs their own bespoke sparse neural networks for the most challenging but high value applications, many of which offer critical value to soldiers, officers, and other personnel throughout the DoD. Femtosense also offers tools for engineers and researchers to train, optimize, and deploy sparse versions of their own networks, open-source networks, or 3rd party networks, to the SPU through common ML frameworks such as TensorFlow Lite and PyTorch. Femtosense has commercialized this technology and is bringing it to market. SPU-001 has been silicon validated, taped-out in the 22nm ULL process from TSMC. Femtosense is undergoing evaluation with 20+ companies to enable problem-solving applications in hearing aids, TWS earbuds/headsets, always-listening remote controls, TVs and displays, smartphones, and IoT sensors. Femtosense is currently developing SPU-002 for extending the capabilities of SPU-001 to the Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing domains. SPU-002 will be optimized for transformer layers, which are the backbones of SotA large language models (LLMs), making it the best choice for processing SWaP-constrained language workloads like live translation.

Technology keywords

Not reported

Other awards by this recipient

Verified by the same UEI. These are other public SBIR/STTR award pages, not a merged company record.

Awards with the same topic code

Verified by an exact topic code match. This is not a text-similarity match.

Research funding history

4 SBIR/STTR records share this UEI (2023–2025). Reported award amounts total $1,628,474. Reported amounts are not federal obligations.

Phases: Phase I, Phase II

Agencies: Department of Defense

Agency intelligence

Department of Defense

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