According to the micro-network news, global 5G development has entered a critical period of commercial deployment. On the basis of the 5G standard freeze, the 5G commercial process is accelerating. On June 14, Beijing time, 3GPP approved the 5G standard independent networking function freeze, which means The first international 5G standard with true and complete meaning was officially launched, and 5G development began to enter a new milestone.
Today, in order to promote the innovative development of the 5G technology industry and converged applications, support the global unified 5G standards and industrial ecological construction, the IMT-2020 (5G) Summit was officially held in Shenzhen, and the latest 5G research and test results of China were released to the domestic and foreign industries. Including Huawei, Qualcomm, Ziguang Zhanrui, Datang and many other companies to fully demonstrate the latest progress of 5G.
5G needs to be integrated with artificial intelligence
With the standard freeze, the 5G technology research and development test is accelerating. According to the plan, China will launch commercial system equipment that conforms to the first version of 5G international standard before the end of this year, and complete the third phase system networking test, convergence system, chip on time. , terminals and other strengths, to create a complete industrial chain, to lay the industrial foundation for 5G commercial.
Zhang Qi, executive vice president of Nokia Bell in Shanghai, said that the 5G network must be high-energy first, followed by the overall spectrum utilization must be efficient, and the network must be intelligent, and can actively set the network's capabilities and performance to meet 5G brings the need for the integration of things, and it effectively forms an Internet of Things and gives it intelligence.
So how do you do it? Zhang Qi said that Nokia released ReefShark at the chip level to support the future network architecture, including digital front end, RFIC front-end module and transceiver and baseband processor. In this future network architecture, the goal is to be high-energy and efficient. The energy usage rate has increased to 60%. The 5G chip needs AI embedding to make the calculation more intelligent, make the 5G network more intelligent, and also need AI to be integrated.
Li Weixing, vice president of Qualcomm Technology, also said that the combination of 5G and artificial intelligence is not just about putting artificial intelligence in the cloud. In fact, opening artificial intelligence to edge computing, edge computing has many advantages, which confirms 5G is actually providing a unified connection architecture. It is not just a data, the speed is growing, it is a new generation of connection and computing architecture.
Huawei: 5G changes society is not a slogan, and will detonate new terminals
'When we talk about 5G, we often talk about 4G to change life, 5G changes society.' Yin Dongming, chief marketing expert of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., is the core marketing expert. He believes that there are two aspects including, on the one hand, there will be more and more The more users and different users use 5G services, in this way, the 5G network capabilities will bring new demands, higher than the previous network requirements.
According to reports, Huawei has completed more than 15 5G core network POC tests so far, and the commercial version has been able to match the 5G commercial network process. 5G changes society, more and more cross-industry partners participate in this process. In March of this year, Huawei and China Mobile, Tencent, Deutsche Telekom, General Electric and other companies announced the establishment of 5G chip alliance in Barcelona. Specific to the slicing project, the main application of slice to more vertical industry markets, such as AR / VR Innovations, as well as some innovation projects that Huawei and Softbank are verifying in the Internet of Vehicles are also underway.
Yin Dongming said that in the project of 5G Slice Alliance, there is also a sub-project called Slice Mall, which hopes to promote innovation through commercial closed-loop to complete practical application. Therefore, 5G change society is not a slogan, and the industry is actively striving through practical actions and contributions. It becomes a reality.
In addition, the arrival of 5G will detonate some new terminals. The explosion of terminals is related to the cost of the terminal itself and network-related factors. Like the popularity of smartphones, it is derived from the popularity of 3G and 4G in bandwidth. This is also 5G for the whole The value brought by the industry, so more people will participate in enjoying this value.
Qualcomm: X50 can meet the 5G standard commercial phone
'According to the judgment of 5G business, the products and services developed for 5G will have such a large market of 12.3 trillion US dollars. ' Li Weixing, vice president of Qualcomm Technology, said that this is not only the extension of the communication industry in new technologies, but actually The use of different scenarios also provides an important opportunity. At present, industry partners are working hard to deploy 5G NR (NSA or SA) according to the industrial process. Starting from the 5G R15 version, the communication industry will go backwards. It is a very long-term deployment. Qualcomm's R&D investment in 5G is actually 10 years. It has done a lot of specific things in 5G NR.
Li Weixing revealed that for the 5G NR mobile prototype system, below 6GHz is very important for China. In terms of millimeter wave, it is also very dependent on many places around the world. Qualcomm's 5G NR prototype system has also been recognized at the Wuzhen Internet Conference. In terms of 5G chip reference design, Qualcomm is working hard to do IoDT work and interoperability testing with major system vendors.
It is reported that Qualcomm is currently doing R&D testing of 5G chips internally, including system testing of simulated state gNodeB. In 2016, Qualcomm announced the world's first 5GNR data connection system, interoperating the entire system, and then Qualcomm released 5G Modem X50, already Many mobile phone manufacturers announced with Qualcomm that they will provide commercial handsets that meet the 3GPP and 5G R15 standards on the basis of the X50.
Ziguang Zhan Rui: 2020-2021 ushered in large-scale 5G terminal commercial
'In the 5G era, the domestic operator's wireless data unlimited traffic strategy has promoted the substantial development of data traffic. There is also Moore's Law in terms of data traffic. Every 12-18 months or so, each person's data traffic will be doubled. Turning the demand. In the era of 5G, through the application characteristics of wide and low latency, many new-level applications are spawned, the first of which is mobile entertainment. 5G eMBB can meet this demand; 5G smart phone will be the best 5G The carrier. 'Zhao Jingming, chief operating officer of Ziguang Zhanrui Technology Co., Ltd. said.
In the 5G era, the characteristics of the new 5G will be able to generate more, even trillion-scale large companies, its importance is self-evident. The progress of 5G is accelerating, on the one hand, standard research, The other aspect is the test of interconnection.
Wang Jingming said that from the end of this year to next year, we will fully enter the pre-commercial stage. It is expected to be pre-commercial by 2019. We will welcome large-scale 5G terminal commercial use in 2020-2021. We will welcome commercial use in the whole industry in 2023. As the backbone of China. Semiconductor companies, we have prepared for the arrival of NSA and SA.
Wang Jingming revealed that Zhanrui plans to implement 5G commercialization in 2019, aiming to achieve interoperability testing with all system equipment suppliers. Before real commercial use, it achieves a relatively high level of equipment interoperability. At the same time, Zhan Rui also Various equipment manufacturers have cooperated and made great progress in all aspects. Zhan Rui's own UniSoC Orca chip is mainly to enable many large-scale applications in 5G.
Datang Mobile: Already with Qualcomm, Zhan Rui opened 5G test
The completion of the '5G standard is an iconic event. It provides us with a very good foundation. The industry can fully invest and determine the basic framework including the technical framework, networking, goals for all aspects of the industry, and future technologies. Going, we can start all over. 'Cai Yuemin, deputy chief engineer of Datang Mobile Communications Equipment Co., Ltd. said.
From the current product status, the 5G initial pre-commercial demand has been met. For example, the 5G initial pre-commercial outdoor macro station, hotspot, coverage and other requirements have complete solutions and can support different frequency bands.
Of course, the industry is mature, and a very important stage is collaboration. Cai Yuemin said that Datang cooperates with various partners in the industry, including terminal chips, test and instrument companies. We have just transferred the downstream business to Qualcomm two days ago. The speed is still very fast; with the sharp, in May, the upside is up, the downside is now progressing faster, and the whole process will be opened at the end of this month, including the whole process of training.
For the 5G challenge, Cai Yuemin said that the first is the improvement of commercialization level, including the power consumption of the base station. According to the current status quo, the power consumption of 5G is still very different from that of 4G, with 2-3 times improvement. The network construction challenge is very large. In terms of power consumption, some work has been implemented on the current equipment platform, and there will be further enhancements in the follow-up, including digital chips and RF chip capabilities. In product design, including process, manufacturing, materials Etc., heat dissipation, structural materials, will have a significant contribution to volume and weight. For large-scale commercial use, existing platforms can meet the demand in terms of capacity. However, from the current level of commercialization, the level of large-scale deployment Still need further improvement. (Proofreading / 叨叨)
2. Solve the AI SoC interconnection challenge is not 'it'?
When an AI SoC design company conducts front-end design (logical design), the first step is to design the function, which divides the SoC into several functional modules, and decides which IP cores will be used to implement these functions. This phase will directly affect the internal SoC. The structure and the interaction between the modules and the reliability of future products. At this time, it is not the IP manufacturers ARM, CEVA, etc., but the NetSpeed company, why is it looking for it? What is behind the mystery?
Interconnecting into a huge challenge
All of this stems from the interconnection needs of AI SoC. NetSpeed Greater China Sales Director Huang Qihong believes that AI technology is getting better in security, autopilot, medical and other applications. These emerging applications put forward advanced requirements for processing power and promote the architecture. Great changes have taken place and changed the design pattern of SoC.
It should be noted that the SoC interconnect structure has become the core issue of on-chip communication, which will directly determine the performance of the chip. How to optimize the SoC interconnect structure to meet the needs of communication between dozens or even hundreds of IP cores, play each IP The performance of the core, the realization of high-performance and high-efficiency interconnection is the challenge that SoC interconnection has been dealing with. For the emerging AI SoC, the interconnection considerations are only a lot more.
Huang Qihong specifically said that the AI SoC architecture requires a lot of algorithm processing, both on the training side and the push side, and requires a large number of matrix multiplications, while requiring low latency, the bandwidth should reach TB/s level. And, the number of AI system cores Numerous, a large number of parallel architectures, requiring arbitrary location data exchange, to achieve fast and efficient point-to-point communication, and support long burst transmission.
As an emerging technology, AI's 'powerful support' for computing power will inevitably require the 'cooperation' of interconnected IP. In the past, the traditional architecture operation mode such as adopting cache and other data bus exchange mode has been 'dead'.
Orion AI's attack
Based on industry demand, NetSpeed introduced the industry's first AI-based SoC chip internal interconnect solution Orion AI.
'Orion AI architecture innovations are: First, programmable multicast, is the industry's only broadcast-based configurable multicast network IP, can dynamically control the spread of point-to-multipoint to improve efficiency; Second, scalable decoupling Architecture, modularization, scalable multi-layer stacking architecture; third, no need to respond to the information transmission mode, protocol support and on-chip network decoupling, support for no-response transmission and response transmission; fourth, end-to-end QoS planning, support for virtual Channel, control bandwidth and delay. 'Huang Qihong stressed that 'NetSpeed has applied for more than 130 patents on Orion AI.'
As a result, Orion AI's pioneering efforts have significantly improved interconnect performance. Huang Qihong further pointed out that, on the one hand, on-chip bandwidth throughput of up to terabytes, and the underlying architecture supporting thousands of computing engines, for the ultimate performance. On the other hand, It supports advanced features such as multicast and broadcast, provides ultra-wide data path, interface bandwidth up to 1024 bits, higher internal structure bandwidth, supports 1000 cores, and supports long burst transmissions up to 4K bytes, in high efficiency and A new benchmark has been set for low latency.
What's more, Orion AI provides an intelligent design environment, supported by a built-in AI Turing machine learning engine that uses supervised learning to explore and optimize SoC interconnects to find the most efficient solution and provide continuity. Design feedback. Linley Group principal analyst Linley Gwennap mentioned that this is an AI-centric design approach, 'just like having a ready-to-go architect to give design advice. Processor architects can adopt Turing Suggest, then take the time to solve other problems in SoC design.'
Drastically reduce development time
It can be said that Orion AI has become a new IP demand with the growth of AI, and NetSpeed found and focused on solving this challenge, and decided to complete a new IP market.
Huang Qihong pointed out that the problem of interconnected IP accounts for about 3%-10% of the overall AI cost. The customer can use the Orion AI to interconnect design in the RTL phase, greatly reducing the front-end design. The trial and error cycle with the back-end design can save an average of 3-4 months, or even 6 months. This is obviously very 'real' in the design cycle of the average 12-18 months chip.
The market level also gave a positive response. It is reported that customers currently have big customers such as Tesla, Intel, Amazon, and leading AI companies such as domestic horizon robots, Cambrian, Baidu and Esperanto. And, for the needs of large customers, special requirements will be placed on interconnection, so NetSpeed will provide customized IP services.
'NetSpeed provides non-encrypted interconnected IP, which can be flexibly adjusted according to Chinese customer requirements in terms of licensing mode and cost. ' Obviously, Huang Qihong's words indicate NetSpeed's hope for the potential of China's AI market.
NetSpeed has established a node for AI interconnection and has become another gold digger in the AI era. What new IP requirements are there at the AI SoC level, and how to meet these needs, perhaps the next opportunity is in sight.
3. Difficult GaN power semiconductors, why is there a lot?
Set micronet messages, Over the past decade or so, the notebooks we've used have become thinner and lighter, and the power adapters that come with them have remained as cumbersome as ever. The reason for this is the performance limitations of power devices, making power supply designs impossible to miniaturize. .
How to change this situation? This requires semiconductor manufacturers, especially power semiconductor manufacturers to achieve breakthroughs in products, changing the state of the power semiconductor market is not warm.
With the demand for power semiconductors in markets such as electric vehicles, power and photovoltaic inverters, GaN power semiconductors have sprung up, or will promote the market's blowout development.
As a GaNPower IC company in the world, Navitas Semiconductors not only saw the future development of GaN power semiconductors, but also saw the vast application market in the future. How does Nawei respond?
How to solve power semiconductor pain points
In general, traditional power solutions often require dozens of discrete components to combine to provide complete functionality, which makes it difficult to shrink the bulk of the power supply.
In today's smart phones, computers and other devices are moving toward thinning and miniaturization, the huge power supply seems so out of place, it is difficult to keep up with the trend, the reason is this.
What Naiwei brings is the way to solve this problem.
It is understood that Nano Micro Semiconductor was founded in 2013 in El Segundo, California. The company has a strong and growing team of experts in the power semiconductor industry, in the successful record of materials, devices, applications, systems and marketing, and innovation, Its founder has more than 200 patents.
So how does nano-micro solve the pain points of power semiconductors?
According to Huang Wannian, director of nanoelectronics FAE and technology marketing, Nano's industry's first GaNFastTM monolithic power IC has integrated GaN drivers, GaN FETs and GaN logic inside the chip, eliminating the need for users to overlap again. The drive circuit can simultaneously achieve MHz frequency and higher efficiency operation, so the design circuit is greatly simplified, and as the components are reduced, the volume is reduced.
This means mobile fast chargers and adapters, LED TVs, electric/hybrid vehicles, LED lighting and new energy solutions can use smaller, lighter, lower system cost power conversion technology.
Compared with traditional silicon materials, Huang Wannian said that Nano's GaN power chips have great advantages in terms of size, weight and cost, while increasing energy efficiency by 5 times.
Mature market opportunities are not many
Now the power electronics industry is entering a new era of exciting new materials, new devices, new magnetism, new controllers and imaginative topologies.
How to provide better and more market-oriented products to the market in such an era is the survival of a manufacturer, especially in the highly competitive field.
Although at present, the market size of GaN power semiconductors is still small, the challenges from price and technology are difficult to overcome in the short term, and the market acceptance of this product is not high.
However, Nawei Semiconductor believes that it is the best time to enter the market only when it sees that the market is promising in the future. When the market matures, there is not much room for survival under fierce competition.
Therefore, on the one hand, Nano-Semiconductor has introduced GaNFastTM power ICs to meet the market demand for different applications. On the other hand, it is also actively expanding the market.
At present, Nawei is mainly targeting the consumer application market of 20 to 300W. This type of market is not very demanding on equipment. The advantage of Nano is to provide a highly integrated package. This is because other manufacturers Not available.
Huang Wannian stressed: 'In addition to the consumer market, Nano is also concerned about high-power, high-frequency application market, energy conversion in the solar market, energy storage in the energy storage market, and high integration of electric vehicles. The micro future wants to solve. '
For example, in automotive solutions, because automotive applications have higher safety requirements, it requires a lot of protection circuits, and Nano's solution can integrate protection circuits to achieve high integration and miniaturization. At the same time, to ensure the reliability of the product.
'Nawei is very optimistic about the future development of GaN power semiconductors. In order to cope with the market demand, Nano is also actively researching and developing, and launches the GaNFast R&D center, especially in the Chinese market. ' Huang Wannian stressed.
Set up a research and development center to penetrate the Chinese market
As early as April of this year, Nano Micro announced its expansion in the Chinese market, including the opening of Shenzhen sales offices and application laboratories, and the acquisition of Wenyu Technology as a new Chinese distributor.
On June 21, Nano announced the opening of a new GaN Fast Design Center in Hangzhou to help groundbreaking partner customers design cutting-edge converters.
Nano-CEO CEO Gene Sheridan said: 'After the establishment of the Shenzhen sales office, we invested heavily in the new Hangzhou GaNFast Design Center to promote technology development and provide more support for Chinese customers.
'The GaNFast Design Center has a team of experienced, proven high-level application engineers who will be responsible for developing new high-frequency power systems and helping customers get the most out of the key features and benefits of GaN-Fast power ICs.' Xu Yingchun, Director and Director of the New R&D Center, stressed. 'Nawei is looking forward to demonstrating how to achieve power, drive and logic monolithic integration in GaN components for smartphones, computers, consumer products, TV and new energy applications. Provide a new generation of efficient, high density chargers and adapters. '
In the future, as nano-GaN power semiconductors penetrate from the consumer market to the high-power, high-frequency power market, Nano will plan to expand the scale of the Hangzhou R&D center to better serve customers.
Perhaps from the current point of view, there are still many problems to be solved for GaN power semiconductors to achieve the explosion. However, in the view of nano-semiconductors, the market without problems is a big problem. The immature GaN power semiconductor market is hidden. Great opportunity! (Proofreading / Ermu)
4. Can ARM's new CPU and GPU core impact Intel's nest?
After continuously creating amazing numbers, ARM's eyes are more long-term. According to the latest data, Arm-based chip shipments reached 120 billion by the end of 2017, accounting for about 40% of the overall market. Arm Senior Marketing Director Ian Smythe said that the ARM-based chip shipments should have exceeded 130 billion so far, and the future will reach 200 billion. In 2035, there will be one trillion connected devices, and 5G, AI, security, full computing and other technologies will It's popular, giving users a more free and more interconnected immersive experience. Based on this Arm IP product line, it is a new force at both the CPU and GPU levels. In addition to the focus on rendering PCs for PC performance, it is a laptop. The ambition of the market is becoming clearer.
The ambition of the Cortex-A76
Last year, the Cortex-A75 released by Arm was optimized for AI and ML capabilities, and introduced TrustZone technology (chip-level security technology) and DynamIQ big.LITTLE topology. This year, Arm announced the latest flagship CPU, Cortex-A76. A 35% improvement in performance over the previous generation, while reducing power consumption by 40% and a 4x improvement in machine learning.
'The reason for this advancement is that the Cortex-A76 uses the same v8.2 instruction set as the previous generation, but the built-in microprocessor architecture is developed from scratch and implements many significant improvements, including decoupling branch prediction and Instruction prefetch, larger decoding width, higher integer and vector and floating point unit, etc. At the same time, Cortex-A76 is a new architecture customized for 7nm process, the main frequency can reach 3.0GHz with 7nm process. Ian Smythe stressed.
This performance is equivalent to Intel's Core i5-7300 on the PC side. If the SoC vendor cache is designed better, its performance can even be comparable to i7. Lenovo's previous generation of Qualcomm Snapdragon 1000 version of Windows 10ARM notebook, indicating that Arm is working hard PC market, but whether to use the Cortex-A76 to challenge Intel/AMD's authority in the PC field is still waiting for the strength and ecological cooperation of the partners. At the same time, the Cortex-A76 also intends to bring notebook-level performance to smartphones. The generation of products has up to 4 times the machine learning performance, solving the delays caused by the continuous interaction of the cloud and the security issues. The Cortex-A76 can be described as 'both heavy and heavy'.
In addition, Arm offers a unique POP technology. Ian Smythe mentioned that the Cortex-A76 POP IP based on TSMC 16FFC provides the best performance at the moment; for those customers who are looking for top-of-the-line and high-end applications, use TSMC's 7FF process. The Cortex-A76 and Cortex-A55 POP IP will be available in the fourth quarter of 2018. Arm POP IP accelerates product implementation, reduces time to market, and leverages the flexibility of DynamIQ big.LITTLE.
GPU and VPU spanning
The GPU can be said to be the main role of Arm in the future to develop the AI computing ecosystem. Starting from the first generation of BiFrost architecture, it has been optimized for various scenarios required for AI computing, including training in machine learning and inference acceleration. By 2018, the Mali-G76 has become the latest flagship GPU of Arm.