The next move of Xilinx

With the help of the programmable 'universal chip' FPGA, FPGA is starting to get hot in the data center, AI and other fields. The inventor of FPGA, Xilinx, has also made great achievements.

Xilinx recently announced its first quarter financial results for FY 2019, showing that the company's revenue reached 684 million US dollars, an increase of 7% over the previous quarter and a 14% increase over the same period last year. This sign that Xilinx has achieved nearly 10 consecutive projects. Quarterly revenue growth!

'At present, we have made good progress in the implementation of the data center strategy, and made a major breakthrough in the super-large computer.' Xilinx said that in the first quarter of the 2019 fiscal year, we accelerated the growth in the core market and set up a camp. Income and profit are high, and it is expected to continue to record growth in the second quarter.

In the meantime, in addition to the historical record high, for Xilinx, there is also an extremely important AI layout, which is the acquisition of China's AI company - Shen Jian Technology.

Although Xilinx did not disclose the specific amount of the acquisition of Shenjian Technology in the quarterly report, according to industry estimates, the acquisition amount is around 300 million US dollars. After the acquisition of Shenjian Technology by heavy money, Xilinx enhanced the cloud to the edge. The artificial intelligence capability can make the IP and toolchain of Shenjian better. The existing content of Shenjian Technology is deeply integrated with the SoC's system-level development tool SoC, and further plays the role of FPGA in the AI ​​field.

In the past 10 quarters, FPGAs have benefited from the high flexibility of programming, short development cycle, and high degree of parallel computing flexibility. Xilinx has benefited from the rapid rise of AI. However, it wants to continue Stable growth, for Xilinx, you need to accurately lay out the next game, that is to aim at car electronics.

There are many types of chips in the automotive electronics market, which need to be large and profitable. With Xi'an's Zynq 7000' (dual-core) and 'Zynq MPSoC' (seven cores), Xilinx is infiltrating into the field of auto driving. The main purpose is full-screen video and driving. The status monitoring of the crew is also applied to trailer images, cameras and radar. In March of this year, Xilinx released ACAP, an adaptive computing acceleration platform, to accelerate the layout of automotive electronics.

In fact, Xilinx has opened up the market in the automotive field for a long time. At present, Xilinx has reached cooperation with 29 automobile brands, entering 110 models and distributing more than 40 million chips. From the camera, the front camera, Radar, looking around, from small processors to large processors, Xilinx has a series of chain layouts.

Tang Xiaolei, vice president of sales for Xilinx Greater China, said: 'Xilinx has achieved very good customer acceptance in many new automotive applications through the Zynq series. The product line includes a dual-core Zynq and a 16-based product. Nano-core Zynq, and MPSOC, are mainly used for full-screen video and driver status monitoring. In addition, they are also used in trailer images, cameras and radars, especially in the radar field. It is a 100% market share, and the binocular camera and the surround system can also find the shadow of Xilinx Zynq. Over the years, our market share in the entire automotive industry has continued to grow, and today the product has penetrated. Among the 110 models of 29 world-renowned brands. 'The latest ACAP released this year is also aimed at the automotive electronics market. ACAP has developed over four years and accumulated more than $1 billion in R&D investment. According to Xilinx: ACAP is A highly integrated multi-core heterogeneous computing platform that can be flexibly modified from the hardware layer based on the needs of various applications and workloads. ACAP can flexibly adapt to the dynamic adjustment during the work process, achieving the performance and performance power ratio that CPU and GPU can't match.

'Everest' is the first ACAP series to be developed using TSMC's 7nm process technology. Compared to today's latest 16nm Virtex VU9P FPGA, 'Everest' is expected to increase the performance of deep neural networks by 20x. 'Everest' 5G remote radio headend can quadruple the bandwidth compared to the latest 16nm radio. 'Everest' for the automotive market will bring significant performance and power savings, Xilinx said: Everest will be delivered at the end of this year and will be delivered to customers in 2019.