Chips&Media Accelerates WAVE-N Ecosystem: Redefining the Future of Next-Generation Customized NPUs

February 24, 2026 -- As a premier multimedia IP provider, Chips&Media is proud to announce the strategic expansion of the WAVE-N ecosystem – our next-generation customized NPU architecture.

Key Objectives:

• Strategic Partnerships: Cultivating alliances with leading AI-based imaging network providers
• IP Integration: Merging our silicon-proven WAVE-N IP with pre-evaluated, high-performance AI networks
• Customer-Centric Innovation: Providing clients with access to state-of-the-art, validated imaging solutions
• Technological Leadership: Pushing the boundaries of what is possible in imaging and vision technology

The primary mission of the WAVE-N ecosystem is to deliver highly optimized AI-driven imaging solutions, empowering customers to select the best-fit technology for their specific requirements.

Since the launch of WAVE-N, Chips&Media has rigorously evaluated its hardware capabilities, specifically focusing on area and power efficiency. Leveraging this proven hardware foundation, we have verified performance across popular imaging applications, including SESR (Super Resolution) and the YOLO series (Object Detection) and have achieved 6x ~ 10x faster performance over competitors. Furthermore, Chips&Media has collaborated with leading AI software vendors to benchmark WAVE-N against traditional NPUs. 

Explore NPU IP:

• Specialized Video Processing NPU IP

The results consistently demonstrate that WAVE-N delivers superior performance using the same hardware resources (area and power) or achieves equivalent performance with significantly fewer resources. This efficiency is critical for modern AI networks, which are rapidly increasing in variety, complexity, and unpredictability.

These performance benchmarks have served as a catalyst for the WAVE-N ecosystem, attracting numerous industry leaders across Asia, North America, and Europe. Today, these partners are working alongside Chips&Media to solidify the ecosystem and ensure product readiness.

The first generation of the WAVE-N ecosystem is scheduled for completion in Q2 of this year. Our ultimate goal is to provide a diverse range of imaging solutions to customers worldwide through an "AI All-in-One" alliance that is both flexible and user-friendly.

Further and more information, including detailed engineering data points from our pre-evaluated AI networks, would be available from Chips&Media local sales and marketing team under NDA.

About Chips&Media,Inc.

Chips&Media is a multimedia IP leader offering HW video codec IP, image processing NPU, lossless/lossy frame buffer compression IP & others. Since 2003, Chips&Media has exclusively focused on the HW video codec IP industry. It has powered over 3,000,000,000 units in the market, adopted by more than 150 semiconductor companies. Chips&Media's video codec IP supports all major and legacy formats from 1080p up to 8K 120fps, including HEVC/H.265, AVC/H.264, AV1, VP9, APV, VVC, JPEG & others. The recent introduction of our image processing NPU IP is transforming Chips&Media into a premium multimedia IP provider. It is custom NPU designed to work for imaging application at high-quality and high-resolution in edge devices. For more information, please visit our website at www.chipsnmedia.com