MRAM Powers Heart Monitoring And Kingston’s Role In Supply Chain Logistics

This article will look at Ambiq’s announcement of an open-source AI model for heart-monitoring applications running on its Apollo4 Plus chips containing MRAM and other memories. It also looks at the role that Kingston Technology plays in managing excess memory inventory for its suppliers and customers.

Wearable AI chip maker, Ambiq announced an open-source AI model utilizing multi-head neural networks (MH-NNs), to enable a variety of real-time heart-monitoring applications running on the company’s Apollo4 Plus chip. Called HeartKit, it is available now as a technical preview at the link below.

GitHubGitHub – AmbiqAI/heartkit: Perform AI-based heart monitoring tasks

HeartKit includes scripts and tools to help AI developers add real-time ECG monitoring capabilities to their health-tech applications. The image below, shows the capabilities shown in the HeartKit Demo.

The Apollo4 Plus SoC offers three types of memory used for AI: MRAM, tightly-coupled memory (TCM), and SSRAM. MRAM is a highly efficient non-volatile memory meant primarily for storing static values. TCM is high performance read/write memory that, as the name implies, tightly coupled to the CPU. SSRAM is general purpose read/write memory that is ‘further’ from the CPU. the MRAM offers outstanding performance and energy efficiency when coupled with TCM or SSRAM

The use of non-volatile MRAM memory to supplement SRAM plus energy efficient algorithms allow the company to provide 13X higher AI efficiency. The chart below compares the Apollo4 Plus with other AI inference engines for several tasks, showing that the Apollo4 Plus runs many AI applications using much lower power.

This greater power efficiency allows the Apollo4 chip to run the same applications with a longer battery life, provide a better endpoint AI application with the same battery life and to enable new endpoint applications where power is not a major issue.

Kingston Technology said that it has shipped over 100 million overclocked memory modules. In March Kingston added the Kingston FURY Renegade Pro DDR5 RDIMM to its product line, whichprovides overclockable server-class DDR5 memory for creators, engineers, and data science professionals. In addition, its Kingston FURY Beast DDR5 and Renegade DDR5 memory modules also received a makeover with the introduction of white heat spreaders to empower users to choose the color that best fits their individual style.

I had a chance to talk with Mike Mohney, Senior Technology Manager at Kingston, recently on the role that his company plays in the memory and storage industry. In particular Kingston serves as a bridge between the major semiconductor suppliers. They supply branded products through the channel for brand name computers as well as products for white box solutions and gaming. But the bulk of their business is related to contract manufacturing for top server and hyperscale data center customers and supply chain logistics.

This last function, supply chain logistics, may need some explanation. Kingston has long term agreements (LTAs) with suppliers and it is a major seller in the channel and client markets and thus helps its big memory suppliers sell their excess inventory. It is currently taking memory inventory off of its big customer’s books and reselling these products in the channel. This helps its customers have better financials and provides a value also to its suppliers, so they are inclined to continue to supply memory products to Kingston when the market improves.

Ambiq’s Apollo4 Plus chip uses MRAM to enable low power heart monitoring. Kingston Technology helps its suppliers and customers deal with excess memory inventory—and sold over 100M overclocked memory modules.