From the official shipment in May 2022, the customer has about 10 products based on the WTM2101 chip. The cooperative customers are mainly intelligent wearable device manufacturers who have higher requirements for computing power, power consumption, and application.EssenceFor nearly one year in the market, Zhicun Technology has shipped nearly one million in customer products such as TWS headsets, VR headsets, and smart watches.
As a new type of architecture computing power, it can effectively solve the problem of storage walls and power -consuming walls under the traditional von Norman architecture, which is expected to become one of the advanced productivity in the digital economy era.
Recently, the reporter of Xinzhiya entered the industrial chain column interviewed Wang Shaodi, the founder and CEO of Zhicun Technology, the leading enterprise of domestic deposits.In the context of the rapid development of AI chips in Houmore, the current development of technology companies and outlook on the future development of the industry.
The leaders of the integrated industrialization of the deposit, the shipment of shipments in less than a year is close to one million pieces
It is understood that Zhicun Technology was established in 2017. It focuses on the industry's integrated chip field, and is the pioneer and leader of the integrated industrialization of calculations.
As early as 2012, the founding team of the company began to explore Nor Flash -based co -calculation chip technology.After 4 years of research in the laboratory, the company CTO Guo Xinjie has gone through 6 streams and captured the technology of deep learning chip technology for the first time, and made the first internationally of the first floating grid depository deep learning chip.It proves that the existence integration technology can be used in deep learning.
In 2017, the existence integration technology began to rise in the industry, and large international semiconductor design, equipment and production companies all started investing in this technical route.Wang Shaodi realized that the integrated technology of the deposit and calculation was about to open the era of its belonging to it, and then ended the postdoctoral research work in advance to return to China to realize the commercialization of the existence technology.
After more than 2 years of research and development, Zhicun Technology, based on NOR FLASH's integrated chip technology, launched the company's first smart voice chip WTM1001 in 2020.
WTM1001 is the first international calculation -in -the -in -be -in -structure chip product internationally.The power consumption of this chip is 300 μA, and the computing power is 20 times that of similar chips on the market. It can directly store and run neural networks. The calculation process is countless data. The efficiency and the traditional architecture of artificial intelligence chips have been increased by nearly 50 times compared to the artificial intelligence chip.Widely used in low -power AIOT scenarios such as wearable devices and smart terminal devices.
Wang Shaodi introduced.
The first generation of products allowed Zhicun Technology to run through the mass production process of calculating the chip in the deposit, and achieved a breakthrough from academic research to commercial applications.
With the experience of the first generation of products, the company's team continued to start the research and development of the second -generation products.In January 2022, Zhicun Technology announced that the WTM2101 WTM2101 was officially mass -produced and successfully launched to the market in March.
As the world's first SOC chip, WTM2101 is based on the integrated existence technology and uses a small packaging size, which can achieve hundreds of voice command words under the micro -level level.Algorithms, health monitoring and action recognition algorithms, in typical application scenarios, the working power consumption is at the micro -tile level.In addition, the chip can use the SUB-MW-level power consumption to complete the large-scale deep learning operation, which can cover multiple application scenarios in voice recognition, voice enhancement, health monitoring, environmental identification, distant wake-up, sports recognition, visual recognition and event detection.
Zhicun Technology WTM2101 Starting SOC chip
Source: Zhicun Technology
WTM2101 chip has both low power consumption and high computing power. Compared with the NPU, DSP, and MCU computing platform, the AI computing power of WTM2101 has increased by 10-200 times, and the power consumption is only between 5uA and 3mA.Especially for the computing power above GOPS, such as TWS, walkiers, hearing aids, etc., the computing power generated by vocal enhancement, noise reduction, and anti -screaming algorithm. The WTM2101 chip based on the depository computing technology can play an advantage.
Wang Shaodi added,In addition, the WTM2101 chip is a developable universal chip, which uses a very small packaging of 2.6X3.2mm2. It includes 1.8M's existing integration NPU, CPU, accelerator group, RAM, etc. Even the conventional non -AI algorithm can run.There are ease, these advantages make WTM2101 better meet market demand and quickly realize the promotion of market.
From the official shipment in May 2022, the customer has about 10 products based on the WTM2101 chip. The cooperative customers are mainly intelligent wearable device manufacturers who have higher requirements for computing power, power consumption, and application.EssenceAfter entering the market for less than one year, Zhicun Technology shipped nearly one million in customer products such as TWS headphones, VR headsets, and smart watches.
Zhicun Technology WTM2101 Stocking Integrated SOC chip main product characteristics
Source: Zhicun Technology
It is worth mentioning that in addition to the chip, Zhicun Technology can also provide customers with rich software tools, which can help more developers develop mature solutions based on WTM2101.Not only that, WTM2101 also provides intelligent voice and healthy intelligent algorithms and continues to upgrade to always maintain the leading effect in the industry.
Following the mass production of WTM2101 chips, the company has developed WTM8 series chips for more high -performance scenarios such as object recognition, classification detection, and video enhancement to meet the needs of various high -energy and complex edge computing scenes.
Wang Shaodi said that the WTM8 series covers 2D (1080P-8K) and 3D video processing scenarios, which has the core advantages of high computing power, low power consumption, high energy efficiency, and low cost.Chip products have a 600 -fold computing power improvement.According to its disclosure, the product has been verified by the current and is expected to be put into the market in 2023.
The computing chip in the deposit is very good at the side of the AI side. Under the blessing of the domestic industrial chain, the shipment volume will achieve a leap of 10 million levels.
It is well known in the industry that modern computers generally adopt the von Neumman architecture, and the memory is separated from the calculator.When performing operations, the original data needs to be transmitted from the memory to the calculator. After the calculator is calculated, the result data is returned to the memory, which causes problems such as low computing energy efficiency, slow speed, and high power consumption.
As a new computing architecture, the core is to fully integrate the storage and computing, effectively overcoming the bottleneck of von Norman architecture, and combined with the advanced packaging, new storage devices and other technologies in the Moore era, which can achieve energy efficiency.The improvement of quantities has become the focus of the current existence technology.
In terms of terminals, according to IDC forecast, the number of global IoT devices in 2025 will exceed 40 billion units, and the amount of data is close to 80ZB. More than half of the data in many scenarios in smart cities, smart homes, and autonomous driving need, AI's computing power demand for single device is between 0.1 ~ 64TOPS.
With obvious advantages in power consumption and computing efficiency, the calculation chip can provide higher computing power and lower power consumption under the unit area, thereby extending the work time of the equipment.It can be suitable for home gateway, industrial gateway, camera, wearable equipment and other scenarios such as operating time, power consumption, and portability.
Entrepreneurship must successfully judge the market.When the company first started, the large market voice at that time was that AI did not need to be ending, and it only needed the cloud.But we feel that there is definitely a side market, because we know what technology can bring, whether the upstream and downstream facilities can be achieved, and what kind of improvement can the product bring to the product after implementation.Therefore, after making full consideration and analysis, we decided to cut in from the most unwilling end -side chip in the market at the beginning of the business, stabilized and gradually deployed the cloud edge, and this position has continued to the present.
Wang Shaodi said,In this field, we are the earliest pioneers and leaders in the market to calculate the market, and we have formed very competitive in products and ecology.In the future, we will further improve the universal and stability of the chip architecture, and continuously optimize the synergistic ability of software and hardware to strengthen the company's competitive advantage.
Calculation product planning in Zhicun Technology
Source: Zhicun Technology
As a newer chip design method, there are also many difficulties and challenges in the process of going towards commercial applications.
For this, Wang Shaodi pointed out:In the process of commercialization from 0 to 1, the integrated chip of the deposit chip has no mature experience to refer to many aspects such as device research and development and manufacturing, circuit design, chip architecture, EDA tool chain to software algorithm ecology.In the process of mass production, stability and process deviation requires teams to explore slowly. We also stepped on many pits and walked through many detours in the process, and finally made breakthroughs in the field.However, these experiences have also helped Zhicun Technology to establish solid and profound technical barriers and first -mover advantages.
In order to accelerate the pace of development and further increase the competitive advantage, knowing that in recent years, Zhicun Technology has been extremely active in the semiconductor first -class market.Just a few days ago, Zhicun Technology also came up with good news, and the company announced that it had successfully received 200 million yuan B2 rounds of financing to accelerate the commercialization process of the integrated chip.
As of now, the company has completed a total of 800 million yuan in financing. The main investors include well -known institutions such as Medica, Xunfein Investment, Hubble Investment, Paradise Silicon Valley, Shenzhen Venture Capital, and SDIC.
With the trust and blessing of these well -known institutions, Zhicun Technology not only achieved mass production of chip computing chips in 2022, but also received market inspection, helping more than ten customers developed based on WTM2101 and achieved functional innovation and upgrading.
Wang Shaodi said,In the future, the company will continue to invest in the development of chip research and development iteration and market application expansion. The shipping volume and the market will expand simultaneously, and the growth of 10 times will be developed. The computing technology in the deposit will break the computing power bottleneck to continuously empower the AI landing.
As a domestic leading company in China and earlier the commercialization of the existence, while conducting product iteration around the WTM sequence, the company is also further enriching software and tool chains to build a good ecology of the integration of deposit.It is believed that after completing the verification period of 0-1, with the gradual volume of main products this year and the successive investment in new products, the company is expected to enter the fast track of development.
