Set micro-grid launch WeChat IC: "Every day IC", big news immediately released, every day IC, every day set micro-network, micro-into a! Scan the end of the two-dimensional code to add attention.
1, Thai Ling Micro BLE chip into the Apple Homekit ecological chain;
Set micro-network news, based on Thai Ling BLE chip multi-Ling P8 is the first landing Apple HomeKit platform smart locks, but also the world's first HomeKit fully automatic, large lock body smart locks,
The first HomeKit smart locks are now officially on the market.
At present, based on Thai Ling BLE chip multi-Ling P8 HomeKit smart lock has officially landed on Apple's official website, and one after another in the retail channels, including Apple stores, including shelves, users can Apple's official website, Apple stores and other channels to understand , buy product.
2, Germany and Huai semiconductor won the Huai'an City 'provincial foreign experts studio';
Set micro-mesh news, according to China Jiangsu network reporter yesterday from Huai'an Municipal Bureau of Social Affairs was informed that the Provincial People's Club recently announced the second batch of 'foreign experts in Jiangsu Province studio' list, Huaiyin Teachers College and Dehua Semiconductor Co., Ltd. 2 Unit 3 studio standings.It is understood that, as of now, Huai'an City, a total of 13 municipal foreign experts studio, provincial foreign experts studio 5.
The successful establishment of a provincial foreign expert studio in Huaiyin Teachers College and Dehuai Semiconductor Co., Ltd. in 2009 introduced a total of 23 foreign master's degree or above, accounting for the city's total master's degree of introduction of 44.2% of the total foreign talent at the provincial level two foreign experts Last year, the studio implemented 8 pilot projects and introduced 25 experts in various fields such as modern agriculture, equipment manufacturing, biomedicine and new materials, and obtained 328,600 yuan subsidies from provincial and municipal levels. The foreign experts' studio system is an innovative foreign expert Working mechanism and promoting the healthy development of foreign experts' work.
3, Dialogue Hangzhou Core CEO Huang Zhi Jie: AI chip Spring Festival production;
Wisdom things Reporter: Yu Yang
Lead: The last six months, the focus of the development of artificial intelligence gradually shifted from the cloud to the terminal, accompanied by the birth of a new generation of computing chip industry in full swing.With a few months, the first time including the AI chip, including a new generation of computing chips Nearly 100 core enterprises from top to bottom of the whole industry chain covered coverage of major giants home and abroad, emerging start-ups, scene applications, foundry production, etc, which comprehensively and deeply tracked the development of the chip industry and innovation and entrepreneurship. One of a series of reports on a new generation of computing chip industry.
The recent emergence of AI chips as a hot topic in the industry is that at least 45 startups around the world are developing voice-interactive and autonomous driving chips and at least five have already secured more than $ 100 million in financing.After this gigantic chip industry began to enter Transformation, AI chip has become a lot of new companies, industry players realize the opportunity to overtake corners.
Hangzhou Guoxin is a chip company previously concerned about the wisdom of things, the end of October last year in Shenzhen launched its first voice AI chip GX8010. CES this year, Hangzhou Guoxin also some of the chip's latest achievements to be demonstrated and proceed overseas Market promotion.
▲ Hangzhou Guoxin CEO Huang Zhi
Recently, Wisdom East and Hangzhou Guoxin CEO Huang Zhijie started a dialogue on the progress of this voice AI chip, AI Division, AI chip research and development behind the story, as well as the development of the AI chip industry in-depth exchange to see this rely on Set-top box chip-making domestic chip companies in the era of artificial intelligence will make what change.
Breakthrough under the market bottleneck: to create AI chips
Hangzhou Guoxin has gone 17 years, belonging to the earlier batch of chip design companies, the main force is the development of set-top box chips.According to Huang Zhijie introduction, they are mainly involved in the early stages of China's digital television standards development and chip development, and later As a global standard set-top box chip, the total output of set-top boxes has reached nearly 300 million and currently holds about 15% market share in the global set-top box chip market. In recent years, the revenue of this business can reach 2 to 300 million yuan.
In 2010, Hangzhou Guoxin also won the 'China Core' 10-Year Achievement Award issued by CSIP, and won several awards such as 'China Chip' Best Market Performance Award in recent years And the most promising prize, showing its achievements in the area of set-top box chips.
However, the current STB chip market is already relatively saturated market, STB in the field of STB has gradually withdrawn from the market. The domestic set-top box development has also been bottlenecked. At present, the annual global STB addition is about 200 million pieces Around this area are basically the mainland and Taiwan companies in the competition.
Although the market is not incremental, but Huang Zhijie it comes to overseas markets, especially the Third World market growth is still fast, still has great potential, the current set-top box chip sales in overseas markets mainly in Hangzhou Guoxin, it has accounted for its own set-top box business the six or seven, so for set-top box chip business in Hangzhou Guoxin there is a large room for growth.
Face bottlenecks in the domestic STB market, the layout of international, open up additional market space is one way to get rapid development in the short term, but how the layout of the future, obviously affect the company's development even greater. Such a time node in 2015 , Hangzhou Guoxin chose to develop AI chips for the field of things in the future layout of this road.
Huang Zhijie frankly, first of all in the set-top box to maintain profitability, hoping to expand emerging business, the layout of another product line to achieve higher growth; the other hand, when Amazon introduced smart speakers Echo, Google released TPU chip, but also to Hangzhou National More determined to go AI chip road.
Third, set-top box chip and AI chip are technically interlinked. Both in the SoC architecture is the same, such as set-top box chip signal demodulation, audio and video encoding and decoding processing, voice chip is also signal processing, audio and video decoding and Neural network is also very similar, Hangzhou Guoxin existing chip experience can help AI chip research and development.In addition, the set-top box chip market in the future also need some voice features.
Visible, in the existing chip advantages, business expansion, the layout of the future demand, the emergence of IoT devices, higher computing power into the needs of the industry environment, Hangzhou core in the end of 2015 began to study the AI direction and set up in the first half of 2016 AI Division.
AI chip has landed a dozen customers
Hangzhou Guoxin released its first GX8010 voice AI chip at the end of October last year and released the chip which was already successful at that time.According to Huang Zhi Jie, it uses TSMC's 40-nanometer process and is now in volume production with the first mass production scale of 10 Tens of thousands or so, is expected before and after the Spring Festival production chips can be supplied to customers.
Designed for IoT applications, the GX8010 AI chip integrates the gxNPU neural network processor independently developed by Hangzhou Guoxin and integrates multiple processors such as the ARM Cortex A7 CPU and Hifi-4 DSP, with low power consumption Offline, removable advantage.
Huang Zhijie further talked about this chip has three bright spots: First, the neural network processor can do some offline recognition, can be some of the AI functions in the local implementation; followed by high integration, the AI chip integrates an 8-channel ADC, microphone array , Neural network processor, CPU, DDR memory, etc., so the motherboard will be more simple, but also reduces the material costs of the motherboard; Third, it uses multi-core heterogeneous architecture, enabling multi-level wake up and long standby, in order to achieve performance , The cost of optimization.
For example, he now, the smart speakers are plugged in, wake-up is mainly running on the CPU, and the need to keep monitoring state, standby power consumption is great, while the state core of Hangzhou, this chip can achieve 50 milliwatts Standby power consumption, if equipped with a 2000 mAh battery, the daily use of a few days there is no problem, thus expanding the use of space for terminal equipment. 'Fully integrated, low power consumption, local intelligence, the scene is removable He further concluded.
In the application scenario, Huang Zhijie first talked about the end of October last year, is actually released two chips, in addition to the AI master GX8010 chip, there is a voice front-end chip GX8008, which can be used as an external sound signal processing alone, And then transform the existing equipment to make it sound.
Combination of these two chips, Hangzhou Guoxin can fall into 4 categories of scenarios: 1, to smart speakers did not represent the smart home, including television, set-top boxes, air conditioners, etc .; 2, story machines, educational toys; 3, 4, home robot.
The first two scenarios can be used directly GX8010 voice AI chip, but like the latter two scenarios, you can GX8008 + master chip to achieve these devices intelligent voice.
According to Huang Zhi Jie said that at present smart speakers, set-top boxes, smart toys and other areas in several dozen customers are using their chips for development, there are dozens of customers are also evaluating the test. Early development of the customer has come to an end, and its products Will soon enter the market.
In addition, Hangzhou Guoxin is also working with Rokid, Si Bi Chi and other algorithmic companies, around the AI chip microphone array, speech recognition algorithm development, and with each cloud platform docking.
AI chip behind the story
As the first AI chip of Hangzhou Guoxin, what has gone through its process from scratch? What are the advantages and the impressive memories left to the founders? Huang Zhijie then told us about this The story behind the chip.
In the first half of 2016, Hangzhou Guoxin set up the AI division. The team has more than 30 members, including software and hardware algorithm engineers, product managers and marketers of AI chips. They plan and define their products and then use the chip research and development Team for chip design.
'If from the AI chip research to the final release, it took about 2 years, if the product from the project to the product is about 1 year', Huang Zhi Jie recalled.As Hangzhou core itself is a chip company, AI chip research and development A lot of things can be universal, so time and R & D spending will be relatively reduced.He also said that this AI chip R & D costs about 50 million, but if it is a start-up company to do much more investment.
Then he was a bit emotionally excited to talk about one of the most impressive things in the chip build process: product positioning. Because the chip cycle is longer, usually takes 18 to 24 months, how to envision the future of the project What happened is more difficult, which is the soul of the chip company.
Because the AI chip is a new thing for Hangzhou Guoxin, and there is no reference to it, its team borrowed the thinking of rapid iteration of the Internet in the development process, technological development and market synchronization. During the iteration process, there will be a demand change, The chip needs change for the chip makers is a very painful thing, resulting in the chip development team is very hard to do, which also impressed Wong Chi particularly impressive.
The most proud of him is the neural network processor gxNPU build, he mentioned the mentioning tone to talk about this NPU module instruction set is defined by Hangzhou National core, made a compilation of the compiler, it is with Compiler, this chip can run independently.In addition, the team has also developed SDK for it, which can be conveniently developed by the mainstream deep learning framework TensorFlow, Caffe and so on.
Only AI module is far from enough
Over the past period, the Cambrian, Horizon, Deep Kam Technology, Hua Xiaxin launched their own AI processors, but also the AI chip to a small climax.
When talking about the AI chip industry, Huang Zhijie talked about that many of the current neural network can only be regarded as accelerator, but can not be called a processor. In simple terms, the main accelerator algorithm is still running on the CPU, but need to accelerate the part of the accelerator On the run; and the processor is the vast majority of algorithms are running on the processor, CPU is simply to do the control. Relatively speaking, the processor easier to achieve high performance, low power operation.
For the AI chip landing, with the neural network processor is still not enough to voice interaction, for example, NPU to solve the activation and local recognition functions, but in the entire voice interaction chain, the first microphone to pick up, and then Microphone signal processing, speech recognition after doing, but also the CPU to make decisions, feedback, output, the specific link, and NPU is only a small part of the entire chip.
Huang Zhijie explained that, from the system point of view, you need to consider how multiple modules work together at the same time, how to optimize.On NPU, but also around the hardware to build their own ecology, including the compiler, SDK development, docking A variety of algorithm development platform, which need to co-ordination, we can see the AI chip landing NPU module alone is not enough.
The AI chip to achieve high performance and low power consumption, heterogeneous architecture has played an important role, some companies also will be heterogeneous computing as an important propaganda point of their products.Huang Zhi Jie that the previous algorithm is to use CPU to run, when this When some of the algorithm features are relatively obvious, they can be taken over by other acceleration modules. Through heterogeneous computing, different modules can be professionally implemented, so that low power consumption, high performance and low cost can be achieved.
However, he also pointed out that the relative difficulty of heterogeneous computing for enterprises is that heterogeneous computing needs to be considered from the perspective of the entire system. After each IP module is connected, how to implement system bandwidth, performance, power consumption and so on Optimization, how to achieve the various modules in the software control level work together, are more difficult question.The meaning of the word, heterogeneous computing difficult for the accumulation of the chip company is not large, but for some companies without chip accumulation then Will be more difficult.
Hangzhou Guoxin released last year's data show that, through the heterogeneous architecture running algorithm, compared to the CPU, you can achieve 30 times the computational speed, 100 times the energy efficiency (performance and power consumption), and memory consumption only needs The original 1/10.
In addition, Zhi-Jie Huang also mentioned some of the current IP vendors claim to be able to handle the number of TFLOPS (floating-point operations per second) of the amount of computing, but such a large computing power is the highest bandwidth, bandwidth can not keep up the performance can not go up, and power Very large, so many companies will stay in the IP stage.
Conclusion: Optimistic about the return of voice chip market specialization
Huang Zhijie believes that speech technology has made great strides in 2017. It is entirely possible that a voice interaction will break out in 2018 in a usable state, and he also believes that as the Internet giants such as BAT continue to subsidize and educate users, 2018 Years of domestic smart speaker market size reached 500 ~ 10 million units is not a problem, we can see that he optimistic about the voice interactive market, optimistic about the future of voice AI chip.
Now Google, Tesla are making custom chips, as if the custom chip is the trend of the times, but he does not agree that custom chips will be a trend, although the giant companies have many channels and needs, they may research and development or custom chips , But in the end it must be a return to the professional, professional people to do other things. Custom chip needs a lot of terminal equipment, no amount of support is meaningless.
When talking about the next step in the evolution of voice-over AI chips, he said voice-over-IP chips will certainly replace voice chips in the future, while lower-power, lower-cost AI chips will be able to be used on a large scale.
4, 20 projects focused on signing Hefei High-tech Zone will build 'semiconductor supporting industrial park';
Set micro-mesh news, according to Hefei online reports yesterday, Hefei High-tech Zone 20 integrated circuit industry projects focused on the contract, covering the entire IC industry chain.
It is reported that the focus of the signing of the 20 projects covering the entire integrated circuit industry chain, of which 13 design categories, materials and equipment category 3, IC packaging and testing of 3, a manufacturing category, the agreement a total investment of about 4.85 billion yuan, The project is characterized by high technology content, large technical advantages, strong driving force and remarkable demonstration effect. All of the projects will expand Hefei's IC development strength after operation.
The data show that in 2017, 39 high-tech zones ICs have settled down and settled projects, with a total investment of 9.47 billion yuan, covering the entire industrial chain such as IC R & D, manufacturing, packaging and testing, materials and equipment. The investment covers the United States, Britain, Japan, etc. Up to now, there are 102 integrated circuit enterprises in the park, accounting for 85% of the total number of the city. The output value of the integrated circuit industry surpasses 11.5 billion yuan, up by 30% over the same period of the previous year.
'The next step in building the entire industrial chain at the same time, give full play to high-tech zones integrated circuit design enterprises agglomeration advantages, focusing on making up the high-tech zones IC weak links, so that the synergy of the entire industrial chain development.' Hefei High-tech Zone, said the relevant person in charge Tech Zone will further optimize its industrial development environment and improve the policy support system so as to attract more excellent IC enterprises to invest and invest in the industry with the best environment and service and transform the Hi-tech Zone into a well-known 'Semiconductor Supporting Industrial Park' .
5, the world's newest flat panel display mask factory settled in Hefei next year Q1 put into operation;
According to Zhong An's online report, it is reported from Hi-tech Zone in Hefei that the most advanced mask manufacturing plant in the global panel industry was opened on January 30 in Hi-tech Zone of Hefei and plans to put into production in the first quarter of next year.
A reticle is a high-precision quartz plate containing a precision pattern of electronic circuits.As a key mold in the manufacture of semiconductors and flat panel displays, photomasks are used to transfer circuit patterns onto semiconductor chips and flat panel display substrates to make integrated circuits, Flat panel displays, and other types of electronic and optical components.
Photronics, a world leader in innovative imaging solutions for the global electronics industry and one of the largest mask suppliers in China, today announced that its new Flat Panel Display (FPD) reticle factory in Hefei is a joint venture between the company and the Chinese mainland Established the first FPD factory.The new factory was named Hefeng Photomask Co., Ltd., planning area will reach about 24,000 square meters, to produce the most advanced 10.5 generation display panel mask, is expected to formally put into operation next year.