LG Electronics to Develop Multi-Tiered Custom AIoT Chips for Smart Home Appliances
LG Electronics is reportedly collaborating with South Korean fabless companies to build a multi-tiered AIoT chip platform. The platform will feature chips ranging from 1.5 to over 30 TOPS to power various smart home appliances. By opening this AIoT platform to local fabless firms, LG aims to reduce development costs and time while building a cohesive ecosystem of AI-powered appliances. This move accelerates the integration of edge AI, enabling smarter, localized processing directly on home devices. The chip lineup is divided into three tiers: high-end (>30 TOPS) for generative AI and vision-language models, mid-range (10 TOPS) for real-time environment perception, and entry-level (1.5 TOPS) for basic tasks like wake-word detection and energy optimization.
## BACKGROUND
AIoT refers to the integration of artificial intelligence with Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure to achieve more efficient operations. TOPS (Trillions of Operations Per Second) measures the computing power of AI hardware, while Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Small Language Models (SLMs) allow edge devices to process multimodal inputs and natural language locally with limited resources.