Heronic Technologies

About Heronic Technologies

Heronic Technologies is a semiconductor hardware firm that spun out of Imperial College London, founded in 2024 by a team of researchers. The founding team includes CEO Alexander Montgomerie-Corcoran, CTO Petros Toupas, and Founding FPGA Engineer Benjamin Biggs, who collectively have extensive research experience in the hardware acceleration of AI algorithms. Their work has led to multiple publications and awards, including from AMD and achieving high performance on the MLPerf Tiny benchmark. The company addresses the problem of low compute occupancy in AI hardware, where a large percentage of a chip remains underutilized. Heronic's core product is the MOSAIC toolflow, a proprietary compiler that automates the design of bespoke AI accelerators for Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). This automated process takes AI models and physical constraints as inputs to synthesize optimized hardware architectures, significantly accelerating the design cycle. The technology is designed to create application-specific processors, moving beyond the 'one-size-fits-all' chip model to deliver architectures tailored for power, performance, and area (PPA) efficiency. Heronic delivers intellectual property (IP) for both FPGAs and ASICs, with customizable goals ranging from low latency to minimal resource usage. The firm targets clients in sectors requiring specialized AI processing, such as industrial quality control, automotive and aerospace safety, medical imaging, robotics, and telecommunications. By providing tailored hardware, the company enables organizations to run advanced AI workloads like object detection, human action recognition, and image segmentation more efficiently. The firm partners with major industry players like Altera, demonstrating its IP on Altera's FPGA platforms. In 2024, Heronic Technologies won a pitch event with semiconductor giant ROHM, leading to commercial discussions to integrate its AI solutions into ROHM's products.