Synopsis: Autonomous Vision Sensor (AVS) Development

The Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Division (NSWC PCD), Panama City, Florida intends to award an Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract on a sole source basis to Andantech Professional Corporation for the development of large-scale circuit designs for various image-sensor, memory, and computation-logic components that will be used as part of a high-throughput, low-power, low-bandwidth vision sensor with reconfigurable analog processing logic.

EOS is a mixed-signal, time-domain compute accelerator that is designed and developed by Andantech. It is a tileable core design that can be used to realize a many-core computational device with incredibly low power draws and high achievable throughputs. It is also a process-scalable design. That is, efficiency of a computational device implemented with the EOS improves when moving to a newer, more advanced transistor process.

The EOS represents data by a novel and proprietary representation, which is the time when a voltage transition occurs. The representation is more suitable than representations by either voltage or the current. This is because time-domain representations are well suited for the trends seen in technology scaling, which is where supply voltage is decreasing whereas transistor speed is improving.

Since only one transition can represent multi-bit information, energy consumption is significantly less for an analog-time-domain representation than one that relies on pulse-density modulation. In this latter case, an exponential number of voltage transitions are required for transmitting multi-bit information. These would require an incredibly long time to resolve and thus be ineffective for practical use.

Although the EOS’ representation resembles that of pulse-width-modulation, the former exploits the time difference between a data line edge and a clock line edge to realize various calculations. This property enables certain operations, like addition, to be obtained for free. That is, no standard gates are needed to implement it, leading to an area- and power-efficient design for compute devices. The EOS will be used as the foundation for a reprogrammable vision sensor.

All components designed and developed as part of this requirement shall be interfaceable and integrable with the EOS compute core so that the full system can be rapidly prototyped if there is a follow-on effort. The Government anticipates the award of a five-year requirements contract that includes a base year and four options. NAICS Code 541330 – Engineering Services applies. SBA Size Standard is $25.5M annually. PSC R425.

Any Offeror wishing to provide responses/comments to this synopsis shall do so via email to Ryan Hodges, Contract Specialist, at ryan.t.hodges.civ@us.navy.mil no later than Monday, 09 December 2024, 1500 CT – the closing date of this synopsis. The Department of Defense will no longer award contracts to contractors not registered in the System for Award Management (SAM) database. Registration may be accomplished by accessing the SAM website at https://www.sam.gov/portal/public/SAM/.

Amendment 1: Extend synopsis closing date from 06 December 2024 to 09 December 2024. Closing time remains unchanged.