Car stuff (public number: chedongxi)
The author | James
Edit the | Xiao Han
2021 is a year of rapid rise of the domestic autonomous driving chip industry, and 2022 is more challenging.
This year, the overseas chip manufacturer NVIDIA will mass-produce the autonomous driving chip Orin, which will be installed in many popular models such as Weilai ET7 and Zhiji L7. Qualcomm's Snapdragon Ride autonomous driving platform will also be mass-produced and installed in Great Wall models.
When the big computing chip quickly entered the market, domestic autonomous driving chip companies with similar businesses also seized this opportunity.
Yesterday afternoon, the domestic autonomous driving chip company Black Sesame Intelligence held a communication meeting in Beijing, Black Sesame Intelligent CMO Yang Yuxin, Vice President of Application Engineering Dr. Deng Kun was interviewed by many media such as Che Dong. Speaking of mass production on the car, Yang Yuxin said that this year we will really mass-produce the large-scale computing chip of Black Sesame Intelligence on the car.
▲The scene of the communication meeting
That is to say, Black Sesame Intelligence just caught the first wave of large-power autonomous driving chips on the car.
At the same time, Black Sesame Intelligence also announced yesterday that it has obtained a strategic investment from Boyuan Capital, a subsidiary of Bosch, becoming the first autonomous driving chip company invested by Bosch in China. In 2021, Black Sesame Intelligent completed hundreds of millions of dollars in strategic rounds and C round financing, with a post-investment valuation of nearly $2 billion, becoming a unicorn enterprise of autonomous driving chips.
One or three chips are about to be loaded with a maximum computing power of 106 TOPS
Speaking of the evolution of mobility technology, Yang Yuxin, CMO of Black Sesame Intelligence, said that autonomous driving will become a key technology for future mobility.
Now the automotive industry is building more intelligent cars, rapidly iterating in the fields of core chips, electronic and electrical architecture, artificial intelligence and battery technology; when the era of unmanned driving comes, in addition to relying on bicycle intelligence, it is also necessary to build a smart road.
Today, the rapid iteration of intelligent cars is inseparable from the calculation of chips, and the battle of computing power has long been launched in the automotive industry.
According to forecasts, from 2022 to 2023, chips with a computing power of more than 100 TOPS will be mass-produced and installed, and in 2025, this number will be increased to 500TOPS, and in 2030, chips with more than 1000TOPS computing power will be popularized.
▲The demand for autonomous driving computing power is constantly increasing
Therefore, in the 5 years since the establishment of Black Sesame Intelligence, it has been conquering the technology of large-scale automatic driving chips. Up to now, there have been three large computing chips to achieve successful tape-out, and will also achieve mass production this year.
Among them, Black Sesame Intelligence released the A1000 series of autonomous driving chips in 2020, and its single chip has a computing power of 58TOPS (INT8), which can be used for L2+ level automatic driving.
▲Huashan No. 2 A1000 Pro chip
Another autopilot chip, the A1000L, is geared towards L2 level autonomous driving, and its computing power is 16TOPS (INT8). At the Shanghai Auto Show held last year, Black Sesame Intelligence also released a large computing chip A1000 Pro, which can be applied to L3 or higher level of automatic driving, and the computing power has reached 106TOPS (INT8).
In the domestic autonomous driving chip industry, Black Sesame Intelligence launched a large computing chip earlier than other players, and has provided customers with test verification. This means that the A1000 series chips can be mass-produced and put on the car earlier.
Speaking of the core competitiveness of Black Sesame Intelligence, Yang Yuxin said that the core competitiveness of Black Sesame Intelligence is the team and many self-developed IP cores.
Among them, the R&D team of Black Sesame Intelligent spans the chip and automobile industries, and the entire R&D team has approached 600 people.
Among them, the chip team has more than 20 years of chip design experience, has previously designed large-scale SoC chips, and has done the world's first image processing IP. The team from the automotive industry also has more than 20 years of experience in the automotive industry, with dozens of intelligent driving cars in mass production experience.
▲Black Sesame Intelligent CMO Yang Yuxin
In 2021, Black Sesame Intelligent accelerated its commercial landing and reached a fixed point with a number of self-owned brand car company customers. Moreover, after more than 2 years of testing and verification, the large computing power chip of Black Sesame Intelligent will achieve mass production this year.
At present, exactly which models are on the car and the brands that were first on the car have not been announced for the time being, but it can be determined that the first few will be self-owned brand models.
In 2021, Black Sesame Intelligence also completed two rounds of financing of hundreds of millions of dollars in strategic rounds and C rounds, and xiaomi yangtze river industry fund is the lead investor. After the completion of these two rounds of financing, the valuation of Black Sesame Intelligent is close to $2 billion, officially entering the ranks of super unicorns. Moreover, the C+ round of financing of Black Sesame Intelligent is also proceeding smoothly.
At the beginning of 2022, Black Sesame Intelligence announced the latest financing information again yesterday, which received a strategic investment from Boyuan Capital under Bosch. Moreover, Black Sesame Intelligent is the first autonomous driving chip company invested by Bosch in China, which improves Bosch's layout in the autonomous driving industry chain.
Second, it has many self-developed IP and obtained a number of vehicle regulation level certifications
Speaking of another core competitiveness of Black Sesame Intelligence, Dr. Deng Kun said that it is a large number of self-developed IP cores. Among the three chips in the A1000 series, the self-developed ISP of Black Sesame Intelligent can make the automatic driving system "see more clearly", and the self-developed NPU is to make the automatic driving system understand the scenes it sees clearly.
▲Dr. Kun Deng, Vice President of Black Sesame Intelligent Application Engineering
Taking the A1000 chip as an example, the ISP of this chip can process 150 million pixels per second, according to the information perceived by the camera, after the processing of the ISP, the back-end computing can be more uniform, and it will not cause poor perception effects due to special scenes such as lighting and shadows.
To put it simply, the human eye switches between two scenes with too large a gap between light and dark may cause temporary "blindness", and the perception performance of the human eye is not very good in scenes such as entering and exiting the tunnel and high beams in the opposite lane. The same is true for cameras, so when processed with isp modules, the entire system can be "seen more clearly".
Another core IP is the neural network module NPU, the NPU of the A1000 chip can reach 58TOPS (INT8), which is mainly used to identify the data after the sensor perception and analyze the vehicle, lane line and other traffic participants.
In addition to the self-developed core IP, the A1000 chip also integrates key cores such as CPU, GPU, and DSP. Among them, the CPU computing power of the A1000 chip can reach 32K DMIPS, and its GPU can achieve 60,000 to 120,000-sided 3D rendering capabilities, in addition to 5 DSPs for digital signal processing.
▲Black sesame intelligent three large computing chip parameters
In terms of vehicle regulation certification, Black Sesame Intelligent obtained ASIL-B safety design certification in 2020, and black sesame once again obtained ASIL-D level functional safety process certification in 2021, and passed with zero deviation.
Dr. Deng Kun also said that it is expected that this year Black Sesame Smart will be certified as a public safety product, and the entire series of chips will fully comply with functional safety certification standards.
Entering the Tier 1 and car companies to verify the mass production stage, Black Sesame Intelligence will also provide a rich underlying software tool chain.
Dr. Deng Kun said that Black Sesame Intelligence can provide car companies with support for different operating systems such as Linux and QNX. At the same time, it also has an open attitude of Kaiyuan and hopes to develop it with partners.
In addition, Black Sesame Intelligence also provides a complete development tool chain for autonomous driving development. Among them, the neural network toolchain supports the transplantation of more than 50 common models, and also supports the existing new neural network development framework.
Dr. Deng Kun said: "Through the form of multi-integration, customers can use our toolchain process to quickly convert existing models, and customize the development of models that are currently in demand. ”
Conclusion: Black Sesame Intelligent accelerates the mass production process
Black Sesame Intelligent's autonomous driving chip is a microcosm of the autonomous development of domestic chips. This year, Black Sesame Intelligence will gradually lay out the front-loading mass production of autonomous driving chips to accelerate the autonomous process of domestic automotive AI chips.
Facing the future travel scenario, Black Sesame Intelligent already has a variety of autonomous driving chip layouts from 5TOPS to 196TOPS, which can meet the full-scenario application from L2 assisted driving to L4 automatic driving.