Car stuff (public number: chedongxi)
The author | Yu Yue
Edit the | Xiao Han
Domestic large computing power chips have entered the countdown stage!
Just this week, the domestic self-driving chip company Black Sesame Intelligent announced that its Huashan No. 2 A1000 chip has been put into large-scale production, and began to continue to ship to industry customers, and will achieve mass production within this year.
Looking at the entire mass production autonomous driving market, L2 level automatic driving has long become the standard of 100,000 yuan new cars. By 2022, people have more expectations for autonomous driving functions, such as navigation assisted driving, urban autonomous driving, autonomous valet parking... Autonomous driving chips with high computing power naturally become an indispensable condition for achieving these functions.
However, in the global autopilot chip market, although there are already mass-produced large-scale autopilot chip solutions, the cost is relatively high, and models of more than 300,000 yuan are difficult to achieve standard equipment.
Obviously, the industry lacks an ultra-cost-effective large-capacity chip solution.
In the face of market demand, the domestic automatic driving chip company Black Sesame Intelligence released the Huashan No. 2 A1000 automatic driving chip in 2020. After two years of hardware and software polishing and verification, the A1000 will become the first large-scale autonomous driving chip in China to complete full mass production certification.
So, what is the pre-production verification of the A1000 chip? Recently, Che Dongxi had an in-depth exchange with Yang Yuxin, the CMO of Black Sesame Intelligence, and found the answer to the question.
First, L2 automatic driving demand is large 100,000 yuan models can also be equipped with large computing chip
Today, mass production autonomous driving has almost entered a period of one iteration per day. Navigation assisted driving, memory parking, urban L2... After the mass production of various advanced L2 functions, the mass production autonomous driving industry is facing a new problem - insufficient computing power.
To complete L2 autonomous driving on complex urban roads, it is essential to record hundreds of meters of parking routes on several floors in parking lots, multi-camera, multi-millimeter wave radar, and even lidar data. At this time, the amount of data generated by the sensor has increased exponentially, and the performance of the traditional low-power automatic driving chip has long been insufficient.
Today, with the spurt growth of L2 automatic driving and computing power demand, the world's autonomous driving chip factories have seen the future of large computing power chips.
NVIDIA, which has an earlier layout, has achieved mass production and installation this year after the release of Orin's automatic driving chip in 2019, and the first models equipped with it are Weilai ET7 and Zhiji L7.
However, looking through the entire market, in addition to Nvidia, there is no second mass-produced high-power autonomous driving chip solution. Moreover, NVIDIA's large-scale computing power plan is only equipped with more than 400,000 models, and the important reason behind it is that the cost is too high.
Such a market situation directly leads to the difficulty of popularizing L2 autonomous driving with advanced functions. How to make models with mainstream prices of 100,000 yuan to 300,000 yuan can also be equipped with large computing chips is the direction of the future development of the mass production autonomous driving industry.
In the face of this market gap, the opportunity for large-scale autonomous driving chips to get on the car is naturally left to domestic manufacturers.
The good news is that 2022 is the first year of the domestic large-scale automatic driving chip, and it has now entered the countdown stage.
Second, complete all mass production certification will be delivered in June
Not long ago, Shan Jizhang, founder and CEO of Black Sesame Intelligence, said at the China Electric Vehicle 100 Forum: "The Huashan No. 2 A1000 automatic driving computing chip developed by Black Sesame Intelligence has been fully mature in terms of functional safety, information security and reliability, and will achieve mass production this year to achieve the function of L2~L3 level automatic driving." ”
The latest information shows that mass production of huashan-2 A1000 chips has begun, and delivery is scheduled to be made from June this year.
▲The left and right are black sesame Huashan No. 2 A1000L and A1000 chips
This means that Black Sesame Intelligence has seized the opportunity of large-power autonomous driving chips to get on the car, and A1000 will become the first large-scale automatic driving chip in China to complete mass production certification.
In fact, as early as June 2020, Black Sesame Intelligence has successfully tape-out and released the A1000 chip, which is based on the 16nm process and has an AI computing power of up to 58TOPS (INT8).
Since then, the A1000 chip has entered the intensive mass production verification stage.
Yang Yuxin, CMO of Black Sesame Intelligence, introduced that in the two-year mass production verification stage, the most challenging part is the vehicle specification certification of the chip.
Inside Black Sesame Intelligence, there is also a team responsible for vehicle specification certification, which plays a project management role, coordinating the cooperation of various departments such as chip design, underlying software, middleware, and upper-layer software.
In June 2019, before the release of the A1000 chip, Black Sesame Intelligent had obtained the security team certification; in July 2020, the A1000 chip obtained the ASIL-B ready functional safety product certification; and in June last year, it obtained the ASIL-D functional safety process certification again. At the same time, Black Sesame Intelligence has also obtained iso9001:2015 and ASPICE CL2 certifications. At the beginning of 2022, the A1000 ASIL-B functional safety product certification was completed, which is the first domestic large computing chip in the industry to complete the certification. In addition, with the addition of AEC-Q100 Grade 2 certification, the A1000 chip has the qualification of "licensed to work".
▲Black Sesame Intelligent obtained vehicle specification-level functional safety certification
In addition to passing a number of vehicle regulation certifications, Black Sesame Intelligence has also completed the industry's mainstream operating system porting and verification, deep learning development tool chain, autonomous driving professional middleware software, and a number of AUTOSAR AP CP verification support work.
In addition, Black Sesame Intelligence also provides a large number of sample codes suitable for different autonomous driving functions and scenarios, such as GPU applications for 3D surround view rendering, algorithm applications for forward lateral fusion perception, H.264/H.265 codecs for driving records, fisheye perception for automatic parking, etc.
At the system level, Black Sesame Intelligent provides diagnostic and safety procedures, supplemented by various production line tools, to provide the greatest convenience for rapid mass production for customers in industries with different needs.
Two years to complete all the work required for chip mass production, this time span is the most basic operation of the mass production of automatic driving chips on the car, with the "certificate on the job" qualification of the A1000 chip, has been ready for mass production on the car.
Third, the new car was listed within the year Dozens of people team stationed in the factory to ensure the first project mass production
Talking about the launch time of the mass production car, Yang Yuxin said that the new car equipped with the black sesame intelligent A1000 series chip is planned to achieve mass production and listing this year.
In addition, Black Sesame Intelligence has obtained a number of car companies fixed-point projects, covering passenger cars and commercial vehicles and other models, and other models equipped with A1000 chips will also be released this year.
Che Dong learned that from now until the new car is listed, the engineers of Black Sesame Intelligent will also work with the vehicle company.
Yang Yuxin said that for each vehicle mass production project, Black Sesame Intelligence will set up a special service team.
On the cooperation model with automakers, Yang Yuxin said that Black Sesame Intelligence has provided customers with "nanny-style technical support", and engineers will work together with car engineers for a long time, and continuously improve products according to the requirements of car companies and customers to accelerate the progress of mass production.
▲Black Sesame Intelligent Headquarters
Observing the overall R&D strength of Black Sesame Intelligence, there are now nearly 700 employees, more than double the number compared to a year ago. More than 90% of them are engineering and technical personnel, focusing on technical support to fully cooperate with the commercialization of A1000.
Yang Yuxin introduced that this has a lot to do with the good business growth and rising demand for software research and development in the past year.
Among the many domestic self-driving chip start-ups, Black Sesame Intelligent has become the first company to mass-produce large-scale autonomous driving chips, which lies in its accurate product positioning and strong technical strength. This has also become the only way for domestic autonomous driving chip companies to win more orders and win more car companies.
Fourth, the self-developed two core IP next generation of large computing power chips were released within the year
From a technical point of view, Black Sesame Intelligence's self-developed DynamAI NN neural network processor, NeuralIQ ISP image signal processor is the core of the automatic driving chip.
Yang Yuxin introduced that the Performance of the NeuralIQ ISP image signal processor developed by Black Sesame Intelligent is very strong, and it can support up to 12 camera signal inputs, bringing the best leading quality in the industry at the same time, this ISP saves objective electronic costs for the entire automatic driving system.
In the traditional autonomous driving scheme, ISPs are packaged with cameras, which means that as long as there is a camera, there must be an ISP. However, Black Sesame Intelligence integrates isps into the A1000 chip, which means that car companies can directly purchase cameras without ISPs, saving costs.
▲Huashan No. 2 A1000 chip architecture
In addition, the DynamAI NN neural network processor consists of a variety of acceleration cores, in addition to the commonly used convolutional calculations, can provide comprehensive acceleration for different hierarchies and operations in the neural network, while supporting hardware sparsification. When applied to autonomous driving inference calculations, it can provide very high efficiency.
Since last year, Black Sesame Intelligence has also begun the research and development of A2000 series chips. According to the plan, Black Sesame Intelligent plans to release this chip within this year and start providing samples to automakers next year.
Yang Yuxin said that the single-chip computing power of the A2000 chip can reach more than 256TOPS, which is at the same level as NVIDIA's mass-produced Orin chip. From the point of view of mass production time, the A2000 series chips are slightly later than the Orin chips, but at the same time, they are more complete and more integrated. In the future, the A2000 chip can provide more powerful comprehensive processing capabilities while solving the demand for large computing power of vehicle enterprises, and can also reduce the cost significantly.
With the powerful technology of AI and vision, as well as accurate product positioning, Black Sesame Intelligence has obtained the ticket for future autonomous driving. This admission ticket will lead Black Sesame Intelligent to expand the market and let the safe and efficient future travel scenario enter more people's lives.