Inspiring the Evolution of Embedded Design

May 27, 2025


Neuromorphic Minds. Pulsar Precision.

Innatera Unveils Pulsar: The World’s First Mass-Market Neuromorphic Microcontroller for the Sensor Edge

Pulsar gives product teams a shortcut to smarter features that were previously off-limits due to size, power, or complexity. Filtering and interpreting sensor data locally keeps the main application processor asleep until truly needed, in some cases, eliminating the need for a main application processor or cloud computing, extending battery life by orders of magnitude. With sub-milliwatt power consumption, Pulsar makes always-on intelligence truly viable, enabling everything from sub-millisecond gesture recognition in wearables to energy-efficient object detection in smart home systems. For example, it achieves real-time responsiveness with power budgets as low as 600 µW for radar-based presence detection and 400 µW for audio scene classification.

Nexperia Launches Industry Leading Automotive-Qualified 1200 V Silicon Carbide MOSFETs in D2PAK-7 Packaging

Nexperia announces a range of highly efficient and robust automotive-qualified silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFETs with RDS(on) values of 30, 40 and 60 mΩ. These devices, which deliver industry-leading figures-of-merit (FoM), were previously offered in industrial grade and have now been awarded AEC-Q101 certification. This makes them suitable for automotive applications like onboard chargers (OBC) and traction inverters in electric vehicles (EV) as well as for DC-DC converters, heating ventilation and air-conditioning systems (HVAC). These switches are housed in the increasingly popular surface mounted D2PAK-7 package, which is more suitable for automated assembly operations than through-hole devices.

MYIR Launches Two New Rockchip Series SOMs: MYC-YR3562 and MYC-YR3506

Both SOMs run the Linux operating system. Tailored for different market segments, the MYC-YR3506 focuses on lightweight, cost-effective solutions, while the MYC-YR3562 targets more demanding applications with higher performance and advanced features. Users can select MYIR's Rockchip processor-based SOMs according to their specific requirements. Based on Rockchip's RK3562 and RK3506 processors, respectively, these SOMs deliver high performance and flexibility for a wide range of applications.

MYIR offers dedicated development boards, MYD-YR3506 and MYD-YR3562, designed for evaluating their corresponding SOMs, along with comprehensive documentation and software packages to empower users to kickstart their projects efficiently.

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Spike Happens

Neuromorphic computing mimics how biological brains process information—using spiking neural networks (SNNs) that operate asynchronously and event-driven. These chips only "fire" when there’s something to respond to, making them inherently energy-efficient.

For embedded systems, that means MCUs that aren’t just programmable—they’re perceptive. A neuromorphic chip can detect a pattern, respond to an anomaly, or recognize a gesture without needing to send raw data to the cloud or wait on a remote processor. Think of it as real-time cognition at the sensor level.


Real-Time Intelligence Without the Cloud

Most embedded devices still rely on one of two models: rule-based logic or sending data upstream for cloud-based AI processing. Both approaches come with trade-offs: latency, energy consumption, bandwidth usage, and security risks.

Neuromorphic microcontrollers sidestep those issues by enabling ultra-low-latency decision-making right where the data is collected.

This is critical for edge scenarios where even milliseconds matter—like collision avoidance in robotics, predictive maintenance in industrial automation, or noise suppression in hearables.


Designed for the Always-On World

Because neuromorphic chips only compute when something happens (i.e., when they receive a spike), their power efficiency is off the charts. Unlike traditional MCUs that burn cycles continuously or wake frequently from sleep, neuromorphic MCUs sip power until needed.


Learning on the Fly

Some neuromorphic architectures also support on-device learning, meaning your system doesn’t just respond—it evolves. That’s a big deal.

Picture a sensor that tunes itself to new environmental noise patterns, or an industrial node that learns to predict motor failures in unique conditions. With traditional systems, adaptation requires over-the-air updates. With neuromorphic MCUs, it’s baked in.


Opening the Door to New Applications

With neuromorphic chips, use cases that once felt impossible suddenly come into reach:

  • Voice wake-on-word systems that run for years on coin cells.
  • Gesture recognition in wearables, even without cameras.
  • Anomaly detection in remote industrial gear.
  • Sensor fusion that mimics animal perception for drones or robots.


Engineers have long worked under the constraints of size, power, and compute. Neuromorphic design doesn’t ignore those—it works with them. It invites us to reimagine intelligence not as something that sits in a data center, but something that lives in the smallest corners of our systems.


Have you worked with neuromorphic hardware yet? What surprised you most?


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