What it does
A dedicated chip designed to take raw audio in and emit processed audio plus inference results out. Everything stays on-device by design — no streaming to a server, no wake-word leaking to a cloud.
Why dedicated silicon
General-purpose CPUs and GPUs leave power on the table for steady-state audio. A fixed pipeline on dedicated silicon hits the latency and energy budget that battery-class devices actually need.
Roadmap target
Dedicated silicon or an FPGA fabric implementation, in that order of preference — the lab already writes FPGA accelerators verified in simulation (see the MAX-OS silicon page), and an FPGA is the natural proving ground before any fixed silicon commitment.
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