'The size of shenzhen's economy exceeded 2.42 trillion yuan in 2018, ranking third in the country, with the electronic information industry accounting for about a quarter.In 2018, the sales volume of shenzhen integrated circuit industry reached 81.169 billion yuan, with a year-on-year growth of 21.44%.Shenzhen's IC design industry saw the fastest growth, with a year-on-year growth of 24.03% in 2018 and a sales volume of 73.83 billion yuan, accounting for 29.05% of China's IC design industry and ranking first in the country for seven consecutive years.But in 2018, shenzhen imported $50 billion worth of chips, compared with more than $200 billion nationwide.''In 2018, the overall sales revenue of China's integrated circuit industry reached 650 billion yuan, up 20.7 percent year on year. However, in 2018, the total import volume of China's integrated circuit industry reached 322 billion dollars, and only 27 percent of the chips we can provide are less than what we actually consume.'This is a set of data from the speakers at the 2019 China (shenzhen) IC summit held on August 22. We can see that China's chip design industry is developing rapidly, but the import amount of chips is still huge, and independent control is still the main challenge facing China's IC industry.Since the sino-us trade friction, especially in the technical field, the blockade imposed by the us on huawei, the restriction on China's semiconductor industry, whether it is hardware represented by chips, platform tools represented by EDA, IP/SoC, or software represented by operating system, is extremely urgent.At this summit, we saw that local enterprises that take independent innovation as their own responsibility are making unremitting efforts.
Flathead risc-v processor: China can also make high performance cpus
Aliyun, which has been the focus of Chinese IC design in recent years, and its flat-headed brother launched the industry's most powerful risc-v processor, the gentie 910, last month.Through the release of this CPU, our IC design industry proved to foreign countries that Chinese people can also make high-performance cpus.It is reported that an enabling platform of ali cloud innovation center will be located in futian district of shenzhen, which is mainly the integrated chip facility platform of flat head ge semiconductor terminal cloud, and the two major features of ali cloud and flat head ge technology innovation are security, control and independent research and development.Some technical details of the gemba 910 were also Shared at the summit.
The gantai 910 is a very large architecture that is compatible with the risc-v64gcw instruction set, a 12-level deep stream deep out-of-order execution kernel that also supports multi-core extensions.The single-core inner core architecture supports three-emission 8GCW, which is the out-of-order kernel architecture that should be the best in the risc-v industry.In addition, 910 extends and enhances the storage-level system, introduces the high performance hierarchical processing technology and the multi-mode dynamic data prefetching technology, and supports the memory access of dual random sequence.There is also a vector acceleration computing engine for AI enhancements, and risc-v based ap-like core performance improved by 40%.
In addition to the processor, the elder brother of the flat MCU SoC design platform for the independent innovation technology, the demand trend of fragmentation in the era of AIoT also widely attention, based on its operational performance is high, fast response speed and combines the characteristics of low power consumption, using SoC platform design service, can at the beginning of the research and development for chip design project inputs, saving more time effort.According to the reporter's knowledge, this SoC platformization helps the customer to reduce TTM quickly, usually reducing the 18-month delivery cycle to 6 months to complete, and on average we can reduce TTM by 60%.At the same time, it also brings the development cost and the risk of stream design to the customer to reduce greatly.
EDA independent and controllable in the gap to find opportunities in the industry integration is the trend
The importance of EDA for IC design is known to all, it directly affects the chip performance cost, etc., and EDA autonomous control is now more attention to a difficult problem.As the representative enterprise of EDA in China, huada jiutian also Shared the experience and opportunities and challenges on the road of EDA independent innovation for many years at this summit.At present, EDA market size is 50-60 billion yuan, the Chinese market accounts for about 8%, more than 4 billion yuan, of which domestic EDA accounted for 400-500 million yuan.The market growth rate of domestic EDA is more than 20% per year, which is in line with the average growth rate of IC design industry, and the global growth rate of the same period is 4%.This data reflects the characteristics of this industry, which is highly monopolistic and has entered into a sunset industry rather than an industry with full market competition. It is difficult for new entrants to cut the pie, because a large amount of upfront investment, including capital and talents, is required.Therefore, China needs to do a good job in basic products and the application end is ok. What is missing is the foundation.
Industry integration is the characteristic of industry development. The gap between domestic enterprises and international giants is mainly in three aspects: first, there is no whole process system.Second, the combination with advanced technology is poor.When there is a new process, it will unite the most powerful chip design companies and EDA manufacturers, and local companies will not have the opportunity to participate.The third is the lack of support for manufacturing sealing and testing.
From these gaps we can see that we do not invest enough, not enough money, not enough people, not enough time.The first driving force from the technical point of view of EDA itself is Moore's law.The second is that the new market for applications will push EDA to produce new technologies that can then transfer the data to the underlying software.The 3rd is design method can bring about EDA new method.
5G, artificial intelligence, Internet of things, automobile and other emerging application markets are driving EDA to produce new technical means.Take 5G as an example, the process is very demanding. Each node needs to be simulated, so it takes a long time to conduct multiple simulation visits.The performance of the ai chip depends on the algorithm, computing power and storage, the algorithm will be updated every time, different points have different algorithms, the biggest problem in the computing power, there are many requirements in the calculation process.
With increasingly rich technological means and more and more application scenarios, there are billions of nodes and more and more interfaces in the world, and the requirements on area are also very strict. One Internet of things chip has more than 200 points.The key to automotive and industrial control chips is reliability. In the initial stage, if you want to control the product cycle, you will have to increase the design constraints, and at the same time, you will face great challenges, requiring strict simulation in the initial design.
A new technology is produced based on the new direction, which requires the company to have a corresponding solution. In order to solve the problem of computing power and memory faced by artificial intelligence, alps-gt is released by huatai in nine days. Based on the calculation, alps-gt is a brand new simulator, which is equivalent to the operating capacity of several commercial cpus, and greatly improves the rate.In order to solve 5G IC, a large number of access requirements are required. The products released by huada in nine days can compress The Times of simulation and ensure the simulation.
With technology lines and the limits of Moore's law, now known as the post-moore era, where chip companies don't necessarily pursue the most advanced technologies, the slower pace creates some opportunities for domestic EDA companies.Some of the new application markets, such as big data and cloud, are best used in China, so the corresponding companies and EDA will also have good development opportunities.From the perspective of national policy, the ministry of education or the ministry of industry and information technology has established microelectronics colleges in various universities, that is, EDA university and design companies are increasingly closely linked, including competitions, scholarships and so on.
From the perspective of the industry, there is a good phenomenon that design companies and domestic upstream and downstream enterprises, especially suppliers, are getting better and better.For example, the relationship between design companies and domestic EDA manufacturers is getting better and better. Automobile electronics, the original vehicle manufacturers are proud not to purchase domestic chips, but now they are tolerant.Generally speaking, capital and talents are the two most lacking in EDA.
Can artificial intelligence land chip follow up?
In 2019, the first thing we talk about about artificial intelligence is how to land?Ai itself is software engineering, what is the logic of software engineering?How to meet the rapid delivery, how to quickly solve the customization and customer system requirements.What are we going to solve for such a requirement?How to quickly face the scene of landing and scene application, the customer to use, the technical value into business value.Differentiation of the requirements, the chip is up?
Zhejiang dahua, as one of the local representative enterprises in the field of artificial intelligence, talked about the innovation direction of AI chip independent innovation from the perspective of AI application scenario requirements at this summit.As computing power increases, it becomes increasingly complex from a single business logic.Such as in the field of traffic management, equipment before may only be detect violations, the inside of the traffic rules is 3 digits, there are many may be fined, but for the traffic police to demand more and more, perhaps for dozens of traffic violation penalties, it is not enough, now not only dealing with cars, and pedestrians running red lights and so on.So we need to do more powerful networking capacity, more flexible products, which is a greater challenge to the chip.Therefore, in the field of artificial intelligence, there are currently four problems to face for chips:
The first is whether the software system is good enough.You may think of chips as hardware, but dahua has always believed that 75 percent of the power needed to make a chip is in software.Because the hardware system is good, but the software is not easy to use, it is very difficult for equipment manufacturers to do well in the hardware, so in the future, chips should be more invested in the software.
The second is chip architecture.Does the chip architecture design match our business requirements?This is something worth thinking about for people who make chips.
The third is elastic calculation.Ask yourself if you can meet your future needs.
The fourth is system power consumption.Zhejiang dahua, for example, has shipped 80 million devices this year, each one watt more than 8 kilowatts.There is also a space problem. A 42 rack can only hold 4U or 8U devices. Is it reasonable from the perspective of space density?Whether it's the end side or the cloud side, we're going to save every watt of our power.
For the fusion of terminal BA, the future deployment of total network computing and total computing force is to deploy computing force and network according to the flow of network and data.Because from the overall solution consideration, saves the overall resources, the network utilization to the most reasonable will consider how to deploy the calculation force.However, the requirements of chips, chip positioning will become the most important issue when doing chip customization in the future.How to locate the chip, the most important thing is to figure out what kind of position and what kind of work to do in the whole network architecture.
Through the Chinese IC summit, we can see that Chinese enterprises for high-end chip area product is insufficient, the lack of talent, innovation ability needs to improve the interest and problems in chip design source or gap larger software development tools, we are fearless challenge and are to the goal step by step closer to 'independently controllable'.