Innatera unveils Pulsar: World’s first mass-market neuromorphic MCU for sensor edge

Innatera, a leading developer of neuromorphic processors, announced the launch of Pulsar, its first commercially available microcontroller to bring brain-like intelligence into edge devices.

Born from more than a decade of pioneering research, Pulsar delivers up to 100X lower latency and 500X lower energy consumption than conventional AI processors. With this breakthrough, Innatera brings a new class of ultra-efficient, brain-inspired intelligence directly to the sensor edge. 

With sensors embedded in everything from wearables and smart homes to cars and industrial systems, the need for real-time, secure, energy-efficient data processing at the edge has never been greater. Pulsar tackles this challenge head-on by processing data locally and intelligently, at the sensor level – eliminating the need to rely on brute-force compute in power-hungry edge processors or data centers to make sense of sensor data.

“Pulsar is not just another AI chip – it represents a fundamental shift in how we bring intelligence to the edge,” says Sumeet Kumar, Co-founder and CEO of Innatera. “This launch is the culmination of over a decade of deep research and engineering in neuromorphic computing, combined with a groundbreaking heterogeneous architecture. It marks the moment that our brain-inspired technology becomes ready for mass-market deployment.

"As demand for real-time, power-efficient intelligence in edge devices continues to grow, Pulsar delivers the capabilities that traditional AI hardware simply can’t – ultra-low latency, minimal power draw, and on-device decision-making. More importantly, it lays the foundation for a new class of intelligent systems that are adaptive, autonomous, and scalable. Pulsar is our first major step toward making that future a reality.”

Built for what’s next
Pulsar introduces a compute architecture based on Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), a generational leap in AI hardware that processes data the way the brain does, focusing only on changes in input. This event-driven model dramatically reduces energy use and latency while delivering precise, real-time decision-making.

Pulsar goes even further by combining neuromorphic compute with traditional signal processing in a revolutionary architecture. Integrating a high-performance RISC-V CPU and dedicated accelerators for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), this architecture provides exceptional versatility on a single chip.

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.

Pulsar is available now.