Yuxin Micro Technology was established in December 2017. The company is able to achieve production in a short period of time. Thanks to its self-developed chip design tools, preliminary results have been achieved, which can greatly improve chip development efficiency and shorten chip development time. .
Under the leadership of Intel's former chief engineer, Li Guangjie, a group of researchers from the core and technology companies who followed him from home and abroad faced difficulties and started the research and development of chip design tools, which was less than half a year. In the time, people saw hope.
Yuxin Micro Technology researchers are doing chip research and development work. (Photos) (Photos of the respondents) More than 30 people have been established in less than one month.
Li Guangjie has worked in Intel for more than 10 years in communications and chip research, won the Intel Highest Honor Award, and was promoted to Intel Chief Engineer.
In the second half of last year, Li Guangjie intends to return to China to start a business, and will aim at the upcoming business opportunities of the Internet of Everything, developing chip design tools, and based on this, research and development of multi-functional IoT communication and computing fusion chips, and related communication protocols and Technology platform.
Li Guangjie told some colleagues and friends about this idea, but they were unanimously opposed. The reasons for opposition are very good: chip design tools have been monopolized by foreign companies, and it is difficult to develop such tools.
'When a worker wants to do something good, he must first sharpen his tools. The most common way to follow is to follow, and to innovate from the most basic design tools, relying on large-scale machine computing to replace manpower, must be the core competitiveness of future chip research and development. 'Wu Ye, the former chief architect of Intel Microsystems, recalled that the idea that Li Guangjie introduced in detail at the time made them think that their ideas are feasible. They believe that following such a technology that has been trusted for many years ', there is hope for a miracle. 'So, I plan to follow him 'mad'."
Finally, they were all moved by Li Guangjie.
In December 2017, Li Guangjie gave up the US green card and high salary, returned to Chongqing, where he was a native of China, and founded Yuxin Micro Technology with the support of the Shapingba District Government. Together, there were more than 10 senior technical experts such as Wu Ye and Zhu Shunyu.
Since then, more technical talents from the United States, Japan, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen have followed Li Guangjie to Chongqing. In less than a month, Yuxin Micro Technology has formed a research and development team of more than 30 people.
In less than half a year, the development process was opened. For the way to go, Li Guangjie has a clear understanding. Entrepreneurship is difficult, and the road to chip entrepreneurship is thorny and has great risks.
Despite this, from the moment he decided to return to China, he decided to challenge himself: 'Do not work hard, how can you know if you can succeed?'
Chips, that is, integrated circuits, are very mysterious high-tech in people's minds. In the past, in the case of chips that were not very complicated, all the work of chip design had to be done manually by electronic engineers. Now, one chip has been integrated. In the era of tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of transistors, it is impossible for electronic engineers to complete chip design by hand.
But with the help of chip design tools (EDA tools, EDA is the abbreviation of electronic design automation technology), things can be much easier - when designing chips, electronic engineers can rely on computers to automate circuit design, performance analysis, design chip layouts, etc. Work, which saves time and manpower.
Even so, chip design is still a project that requires a lot of manpower and material resources, long development cycle and high risk.
Li Guangjie saw the pain point of this industry, decided not to take the usual path, explored and designed a new communication and computing fusion chip development method.
The core idea of this method is: In the complex chip design process of communication, calculation, etc., the designer only needs to pay attention to the algorithm and the requirement itself. The work done by the engineer in the traditional chip design mode is most likely to be completed by the computer.
According to this direction, at the end of last year, Li Guangjie led the research team members to start a nearly closed research work.
This group of people, most of them are 80 years old, and they are very strong. Everyone is renting around the company. Every day except eating and going home to sleep, the rest of the time is in the company to develop chip design tools. In the first half of the year, everyone often works overtime. Late at night, I have never rested on weekends.
At the same time, based on their own years of technical accumulation, we have proposed a variety of different algorithmic schemes, and repeated countless trials. After hundreds of failures, corrections, optimizations, and finally, development was achieved in less than half a year. The process has developed a new EDA tool with independent intellectual property rights.
Reducing the chip design cycle to 6-9 months Compared to existing EDA tools, the EDA tool developed by Yuxin Micro has a unique advantage – with it, designers can describe requirements and algorithms in a simpler way, relying on Computer program a series of optimization algorithms and large-scale operations to achieve intelligent chip design.
'After testing, our tools can double the efficiency of chip development.' Li Guangjie told the Chongqing Daily reporter.
He gave an example: The design of a SoC chip (on-chip system chip, a single chip can integrate a central processor, a complete system of memory and peripheral circuits) is a complex project. In the past, many international companies needed to Hundreds of people come to do this. And, from the beginning of the design to the sample, it usually takes 18 months.
If you use the company's EDA tools, you can generally reduce the chip design cycle to 6-9 months, and can significantly reduce the number of people. This will greatly increase the speed of chip development, reduce research and development costs, and accelerate the chip. Time to market.
However, the voice of doubt in the industry quickly came.
'This is mostly a gimmick, not an amazing achievement! 'An integrated circuit expert at a university in Chongqing suspected that the core technology is in the hands of foreign companies, EDA tools, a Chongqing enterprise in a short time It is almost impossible to break through the technical bottleneck.
In the face of doubts, Li Guangjie said: 'Can you succeed, and finally use the facts to speak. And the first commercial chip project of Yuxin Micro Technology is an experimental field.'
According to its introduction, this is a fully integrated fusion chip (on-chip system chip) project, which will integrate multiple functions such as cellular IoT chip function, GPS, Beidou positioning chip function and unlicensed band communication protocol chip function. Currently, research team Has completed all the development process, is rapidly developing iterative optimization tools and chips, and will be able to produce films at the end of the year.
Li Guangjie also revealed that the research and development results of Yuxin Micro Technology have attracted the attention of many venture capital institutions. At present, the company has successfully completed the angel round financing and is planning to carry out the A round of financing.