Chipmakers invited to bid for chip that can 'see'

Bureau d'Etudes Vision (BEV), a French IC designs company this week launched

a potentially revolutionary "visual processor," a chip that can see by

mimicking the function of the human eye. Equally revolutionary is the way the

company is planning to sell the chip technology by auction. The so-called

"Generic Visual Perception Processor" (GVPP) can compute 20 billion

instructions per second, allowing it to do everything from making cars safer to

selecting ripe fruit. BEV claims the chips can be mass-produced for as little as

$6 per chip.

The chip emulates the human eye in its ability to sense different colors and

detect movement. It detects objects in a motion video signal and then to locates

and tracks them in real time. In the automotive industry, GVPP devices could

keep "watch'' over sleepy drivers and trigger an alarm when their eyelids

close. The GVPP could also be used in robotics, particularly for dirty and

dangerous jobs such cleaning up hazardous waste. And in agriculture and

fisheries, GVPP could help with labor intensive tasks such as crop disease and

parasite identification, and ripeness control, while military applications

include unmanned air vehicles, automatic target detection, trajectory

correction, ground reconnaissance and surveillance, the company says.

"It is very clear that this is breakthrough technology,'' said Joseph

Harbaugh, BEV's director of technology transfer. "This is a generic chip.

We've already identified more than 100 applications in ten or more industries.''

The market for the seeing chip could be worth billions of dollars. Rather than

manufacturing and selling the chips itself, BEV is trying to get one of the

semiconductor industry’s leading manufacturers to purchase the rights to make

the chips. BEV has set up an elaborate three-stage auction to get the best price

for its chip. "We needed to find out what the market thought the value was.

To do that, the most efficient and effective way was to conduct an auction,''

Harbaugh said.

Some 60 potential bidders have received background material on the GVPP. Last

week, the company began demonstrating the chip technology to possible buyers. In

the next stage these companies will be allowed to experiment with the

technology. Next, the potential bidders will have access to a confidential data

room as well as to the chip's inventor, BEV chief engineer Patrick Pirim. They

will also have access to an "evaluation kit'' consisting of a working test

model of GVPP. The remaining bidders will be invited to submit their entry. The

winner gets the intellectual property, and the know-how, all the trade secrets.