【Editor's Note】In 2021, the semiconductor industry is still moving forward in challenges. Factors such as the post-epidemic era, production capacity tension, and geopolitics still profoundly affect the global semiconductor industry chain and ecology. How will the global semiconductor industry develop in 2022? Where will new challenges come from? In order to clarify these problems, "Jiwei Network" specially launched the "2021-2022 Special Topic", focusing on hot topics, hot technologies and applications, major events and other multi-dimensional combing, providing reference mirrors for upstream and downstream enterprises. The enterprise perspective of this issue comes from the "integration of deposit and computing" to unlock the chip large computing power enterprise Houmo Intelligence.
Set micro-network news, hardcore era, computing power first. International competition for computing power is extremely fierce, if the computing power is not in one dimension, competitiveness is naturally not in one dimension. The computing power of the company's chips measures its position in the industry. With the development of AI chips, how to provide chips with large computing power and high energy efficiency has become an urgent problem to be solved.
At present, most of the chip design adopts the von Neumann architecture, the memory unit and the computing unit are separated, the data transmission power consumption is large, the storage writing time is too long, the energy consumption and time ratio of the real calculation are very low, and the chip architecture can be optimized. At present, the integrated technology of storage and computing can integrate computing and storage, alleviate data handling problems, and save performance and power consumption, which is a promising and effective means to solve this problem.
Dr. Wu Qiang, founder of Nanjing Houmo Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., said that the integrated technology of memory and computing can achieve a large computing power of the chip and an increase of ten times or even a hundred times in energy efficiency, which can change the future computing pattern.
According to the official website of Nanjing Houmo Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Houmo Intelligence"), the company is the first intelligent computing chip company in China that focuses on the integration of storage and computing technology, through the integration and innovation of computing and storage modules, breaks through the "storage bottleneck" of intelligent computing, realizes large computing power, and does large computing power intelligent computing chip company facing edge end and cloud reasoning.
Looking back at 2021, the feasibility of large-scale computing AI chips will be verified with the integrated technology of memory and computing
Founded in 2020, Houmo Intelligence was jointly established by Dr. Wu Qiang and a number of top international scholars and senior experts in the chip industry. At the beginning of its establishment, the company quickly built a "China's strongest" original technology and engineering landing team. In 2021, Houmo Intelligence completed the verification tape-out of the core module of memory and computing integration, which fully proved the feasibility of using memory and computing integration technology to make a large computing power AI chip.
According to reports, many members of the original technical team of Houmo Intelligent Memory and Computing have returnee backgrounds, have accumulated nearly 15 years of research experience in the direction of advanced storage devices and integrated memory and computing technology, and have won the EDAA Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Award, and the International Microelectronics Solid-State Device Conference "International Best Young Scholars", and have successfully led 6 SRAM-CIM tape-outs, and the results have been published in the highest academic conference on international chips, SUCH Asscc, ISCA, and HPCA. The project landing team accounts for more than 80% of the master's and doctoral degrees, mainly from AMD, Intel, Huawei HiSilicon, Horizon and other well-known chip companies at home and abroad, with nearly 20 years of high-performance CPU/GPU/vehicle specification AI chip design and mass production experience.
As a popular track for investment and financing in 2021, Houmo Intelligent is also favored by capital, and has received capital support from Sequoia Capital China Fund, Qiming Venture Capital, Jingwei China and other capital support, and has completed tens of millions of dollars of angel rounds and 300 million yuan pre-A round of financing.
Looking ahead to 2022, change the world with computing power
Human intelligence is a major trend, artificial intelligence applications such as intelligent driving, AR, VR will gradually popularize, and these intelligent applications have a foundation and dependence behind - large computing power. For example, L5-level intelligent driving requires 4000TOPS or even higher hash rate, followed by the fact that it needs large hash rates under high energy efficiency, because 4000TOPS hash rate is currently about 1 watt and 1TOPS level, and 4000TOPS means 4000 watts or even more power consumption, which cannot be deployed. Therefore, whether from the perspective of heat dissipation or other aspects, only the improvement of energy-efficient computing power can promote the landing of artificial intelligence applications.
Looking forward to 2022, Houmo Intelligent will continue to promote product development based on advanced storage processes such as memory and computing integration technology and SRAM/MRAM/RRAM, and launch the first large-scale computing power AI chip based on deposit and computing in China.
The vision of Houmo Intelligence is to create an AI chip with a "tenfold effect" to meet the needs of super computing power in the era of true artificial intelligence, and to change the world with unlimited computing power.
The window of entrepreneurship is narrowed, and the creation of new technologies is encouraged
For the semiconductor investment fever, Houmo Intelligent believes that the first year of China's large chips is from 2018, to 2021 is a three-year open window period, and by the end of 2021, the entrepreneurial window will be narrowed. At this time, a group of early start-up companies have occupied a seat, and if they are still doing products based on similar technologies, homogenization competition will be very serious and it is difficult to differentiate.
Houmo Intelligence is an early entrepreneurial enterprise in terms of integrated technology, which is a good time to catch up. In addition to the memory and computing integrated chip, Houmo Intelligent hopes that the state can encourage enterprises to explore other underlying innovative technology routes, especially basic technologies such as new materials and new storage media, and the development of these technologies is even expected to overturn the basic assumptions of the entire computer design and create new ideas for AI chips. With the influx of entrepreneurs and capital, the market will gradually become rational, the survival of the fittest, and only truly valuable companies will go long. (Proofreading/Xiaobei)
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