Text/BU Audit/Zi Yang Correction/Zhi Qiu
Today, Moore's Law is on the verge of failure. With the gradual reduction of the characteristic size of the chip, the current mainstream silicon-based material chips in the industry are approaching the physical limit, and the silicon-based chips have reached a bottleneck.
In such a situation, the industry is looking for a replacement for silicon-based chips. The photonic chip is one of the candidates.
The photonic chip reconstructs the logical expression structure of the chip to achieve higher computing power. At the same time, silicon-based photonic technology also has the advantages of ultra-low latency, high throughput, and high energy efficiency ratio. Therefore, photonic chips have become a must for many countries.
Photonic chips give domestic chips an opportunity to "change lanes and overtake", and Chinese companies have successfully seized this opportunity and taken a key step.
The first photonic chip is introduced
On December 15, Xizhi Technology announced the company's latest high-performance photonic computing processor - PACE, which is another major breakthrough achieved by Xizhi Technology.
From the launch of the world's first photonic chip prototype board in April 2019 to the second generation of photonic computing processors now, Xizhi Technology has achieved a secondary jump in 3 years.
It is understood that the parameters of Xizhi Technology's processor PACE are remarkable. PACE consists of a photonic matrix of 64×64, with an integrated silicon optical chip stacked in a 3D package and a CMOS microelectronic chip as the core.
With the blessing of a variety of technologies, PACE has become the most integrated chip in the world, with a single photonic chip set of more than 10,000 photon devices running a 1GHz system clock.
Even in actual operation, PACE is running a specific recurrent neural network more than 100 times faster than the current high-end GPU. This success proves that photonic chips do have the strength to surpass traditional silicon-based chips.
PACE completed the first verification of the superiority of photonic computing, and showed the actual performance of photonic computing in more fields, revealing more possibilities for photonic chips.
What's even more remarkable is that Xizhi Technology is promoting the practical application of the company's achievements, rather than just letting it stay in the laboratory stage. According to the planning of Xizhi Technology, starting from 2022, photonic technology will land in scenarios that can show its advantages, such as cloud computing, intelligent driving, quantitative trading and so on.
Moreover, application scenarios are gradually extending to GPUs, automotive chips and other fields, which have great demand for computing power. Photonic chips with higher computing power thanks to the advantages of high energy efficiency, high throughput and low latency can naturally make a big difference in these fields.
This achievement of Xizhi Technology has brought hope to the global breakthrough of Moore's Law dilemma and given the industry a new choice. At the same time, this is undoubtedly an opportunity for the chip industry that is currently monopolizing in China.
Domestic chips rely on imports
According to data released by the General Administration of Customs on December 7, from January to November this year, China imported 2.51 trillion yuan of integrated circuits, and the number of imports was 582.2 billion.
That's a huge number. Moreover, the degree of China's chip imports has further deepened, and today's total imports have exceeded the whole year of 2020.
It can be seen that China has a high degree of monopoly in the field of chips. Under such circumstances, it will take a long time for our country to catch up with foreign countries.
On the new track of photonic chips, China does not have much distance from foreign countries, so it is much easier to surpass. Therefore, through the "lane change overtaking" domestic chip is expected to usher in the dawn.