Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizen OC_Formula for the clue delivery! The CEO of almost all chip startups will say, "our core value is to solve customers' practical problems with better chips."

However, the problem facing many chip startups is that it is difficult to break through after the chip is designed and produced. At this time, the company whose products can be successfully landed has become the focus of attention in this field.

LeapFive, founded by former Google CTO Jiang Chaohui in 2020, is a noteworthy RISC-V chip company in the chip start-up boom.

The reason is very simple. Standing in 2022, when startups compete and launch high-performance products of Yuefang Technology, there are already cases from customers in the fields of electric power, intelligent logistics and secret computing to share. Leifeng network learned that the chip of Yuefang technology has been deployed in many units of the State Grid and can be replicated on a large scale.

The high-performance RISC-V SoC NB2 of Yuefang Technology, which is expected to be mass-produced by the end of this year, is between Arm CortexA55 and A72, poking the small core of Arm and pointing to the performance of Arm large core.

Chip Entrepreneurship actual comparison of the understanding of the application scenario for near-death startups, especially for chip startups that cost tens or even hundreds of millions of yuan per chip, it is more necessary to think clearly about the product positioning and application market at the beginning of the venture.

Yuan Bohu, VP of Yuefang Technology Research and Development, said at the new product launch of "Yue Fang Wisdom Linkage to help double carbon New Infrastructure", "the final evaluation of a chip product should be based on the scale and maturity of the application, so the core is application as the king." the logic of conversion to the bottom layer has three points: supply chain security, differentiation and cost advantage for customers. "

The truth that application is king is easy to understand, but at the beginning of starting a business, there are not many chip start-ups with a clear target application scenario.

"when we started our business in 2020, it was just me and Yuan Bohu. Now the company has a team of 170 or 80 people." "We focus on industry and the Internet of things around three cores," said Jiang Zhaohui, founder and CTO of Yuefang Technology. "the first is to use RISC-V 's open source CPU architecture to design edge chips with high, middle and low-end performance; the second is to include block chain technology to ensure that data is untampered and traceable; and the third is to focus on security performance."

There are actually many reasons for starting a business around industry and Internet of things applications. On the one hand, founder Jiang Chaohui feels about using technology to solve energy problems, and a more practical reason is the demand for SoC chips in the industrial market, and it is less difficult to use RISC-V to land in the industrial market.

"due to the fierce competition in the market, consumer chips will first pay attention to cost, followed by functional differentiation and supply chain security. Industrial chips are just the opposite. Customers will first consider supply chain security, then differentiation, and finally cost advantage." Yuan Bohu said.

"in terms of software ecology, the software ecology in the industrial field is slightly smaller than the consumer ecology, which is very much in line with the current situation of the development of RISC-V."

In addition to a clear product planning, market application, can better reflect the application of Yue Fang technology is the king of the early depth of partners.

Define the chip from the application, the performance surpasses the Arm A55 Leifeng net to learn that Yuefang Technology fully understood the chip demand in the industrial Internet of things field at the beginning of the early chip design, and deeply cooperated with the Chinese Academy of Power Sciences to design a high-performance NB2 processor.

Pu Tianjiao, director of the artificial Intelligence Application Research Institute of China Electric Power Research Institute Co., Ltd., pointed out at the press conference that the power Internet of things is currently facing several common problems: high pressure of data transmission and processing, heavy computing load of cloud master stations, inability to mine massive data value, and difficulty in chip supply. Therefore, for the power edge intelligent high computing power, low power consumption, autonomous control and other aspects put forward new requirements.

"in view of the technological advantages of NB2 chips, the China Academy of Electrical Sciences and Yue Fang signed a strategic cooperation agreement and stayed in the mass entrepreneurship and innovation demonstration center of the State Grid Company. Both sides jointly undertaken the national key R & D programs and the State Grid Company's technology projects to jointly promote the formulation of specifications, collaborative R & D and achievement implementation of smart chips at the edge of the power Internet of things." Pu Tianjiao further said.

It is precisely because of the clear demand that Yuefang Technology's NB2 chip dares to use 12nm technology, independently designs a RISC-V CPU whose main frequency exceeds 1.5GHz, and integrates industrial-grade SoC such as NPU,DSP and VPU.

NB2's self-developed CPU frequency up to 1.8GHz Magi GPU up to 850MHz CPU achieves 4TOPS performance under INT8 data format, and integrates VPU and visual DSP used to enhance auxiliary NPU visual processing, as well as audio DSP.

From the performance of CPU, the CPU performance of NB2 is between Arm Cortex A55 and Cortex A72. At a time when most of the RISC-V camp is compared to the Arm Cortex M series, NB2 takes the lead in taking a step towards the high end.

Compared with hardware performance, software is the key to limit the breakthrough of RISC-V processors to higher-end applications.

RISC-V as a new instruction set, the software ecology is not mature enough to make many RISC-V chip companies choose to cut in from the MCU market, which is not highly dependent on ecology, so we can see that there are a large number of RISC-V products in the MCU market where the main frequency of CPU is lower than that of 200MHz, and there are less than 10 kinds of MPU products in 200MHz-1.5GHz, and the high-end application processors (AP) whose main frequency performance of CPU is better than 1.5GHz is almost blank.

"based on the current situation of the development of RISC-V, we have chosen the industrial Internet, giving priority to the stability of industrial applications, which provides some convenience for us to start from RISC-V and to design a software ecology that relatively meets the application of the industrial race track." Yuan Bohu said.

But even so, Yuefang Technology invested in a software team of more than 60 people in its early days.

Overall, Yuan Bohu stressed that NB2 is the first mass-produced high-end 12nm industrial-grade SoC based on RISC-V.

"We strictly follow the testing standards of industrial-grade chips, testing at minus 55 degrees Celsius to 125 degrees Celsius for more than 1000 hours, with industrial quality and performance in high temperature measurement. It is also very consistent with the thermal design requirements of the whole power grid system."

NB2 also supports heterogeneous OS running environment, which can also meet the special needs of some programs running on bare metal and some programs running on Linux in industrial scenarios.

Chip startup is the ultimate commercial success of Wang Chip Company, which is actually the success of software and ecology.

Therefore, chip startups' product landing challenges are huge and easy to understand. after all, most start-ups use new technologies, such as AI chip entrepreneurship and RISC-V entrepreneurship, these two types of chips are relatively new and do not have a mature software ecology, and it is a great challenge for customers to take advantage of these hardware advantages.

"We hope that with rich SDK performance, all hardware performance can be brought into full play, and customer applications can be migrated to our system normally, quickly and stably." Yuan Bohu said.

But for RISC-V chips, customer acceptance is very critical, after all, RISC-V is a relatively new category of products, both in reliability and performance customers will have greater concerns. But because of this, under the background of few SoC options in the industrial field, the software ecology is relatively simple, and it is the breakthrough point of RISC-V high-performance chips.

The practice of Yuefang Technology is to provide customers with a complete system, in addition to chips and software, as well as corresponding reference design hardware, as well as a complete development platform.

At present, the cooperation between Yuefang Technology and China Academy of Electrical Sciences includes NB2-based edge gateway and UAV inspection system. For photovoltaic power prediction, cable corridor sensing, transmission line on-line monitoring, substation monitoring and other application scenarios, NB2 has been deployed in China Academy of Electric Sciences, Chongqing Company, Tianjin Company, Liaoning Company and other units, and is currently operating normally. Next, the two sides will explore in depth in more areas.

Yuefang Technology also cooperates deeply with Lianfeng Technology to apply NB2 in intelligent logistics warehousing scenarios.

Cooperate with Motors Technology to realize secret computing based on RISC-V based on NB2 and run through the trusted data value chain of the Internet of things.

Yuan Bohu also said, "to jointly develop full-stack software and hardware solutions with customers is only a work that needs to be done with customers when they lack confidence at the beginning, which is not a trend."

This means that after the software ecology of RISC-V is gradually mature in the future, the ease of use of high-performance RISC-V chips will be gradually improved, and the application of RISC-V high-performance chips will be further expanded.

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