The RWTH Aachen, the Forschungszentrum Jülich, AMO GmbH, IHK Aachen, the companies AixACCT Systems GmbH, AIXTRON SE, AppTek GmbH, ELMOS Semiconductor SE, RWTH Innovation GmbH, STAR Healthcare Management, and the start-ups AiXscale Photonics UG, Black Semiconductor GmbH, Clinomic GmbH, and Gremse-IT GmbH are involved in NeuroSys. Professor Max Lemme from the Chair of Electronic Devices and Managing Director of AMO GmbH will coordinate the work. The goal is to develop neuromorphic hardware for artificial intelligence applications and thus achieve technological independence for Germany and Europe. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research is providing up to 45 million euros for this purpose.
In Europe, there are only a few global corporations in the field of hardware and software. Technological independence is of strategic importance, as artificial intelligence will be the building block for the next stage of global development. However, not only future economic growth depends on this key technology, but also the management of major societal challenges such as climate change, health, work or mobility. Artificial intelligence (AI) brings new challenges at the same time, for example, training large neural networks based on modern graphics processing units (GPUs) with deep learning methods causes high CO2 emissions, which further aggravate the climate problem. GPU-based neural networks are therefore ecologically unsustainable.