The 2023 International Integrated Circuit Exhibition and Seminar (IIC Shenzhen 2023) was recently held in Shenzhen. At the concurrent 2023 Global CEO Summit, Dr. Qiu Xiaoxin, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Axera, was invited to attend and delivered a keynote speech entitled Edge Intelligence: Embark on the Vast Ocean of Democratized AI Together, sharing her cutting-edge insights on the chip and semiconductor industry as well as Axera's latest practical implementation results.

The Global CEO Summit is one of the most influential entrepreneur summits in the international semiconductor field. With the theme of Technology for Good, Semiconductors Empower the Future, this year's summit gathered important manufacturers and industry leaders in the semiconductor industry to look into future technological trends and emerging application opportunities. At the summit, Dr. Qiu Xiaoxin depicted a new industrial blueprint for the intelligent era, which attracted extensive attention from various parties.

Focus on Perception and Computing
Tap into the Trillion-scale Smart Chip Market

In her speech, Dr. Qiu Xiaoxin stated that smart chips have now become an entry point for the digitalization of the physical world, and different sensors are like the organs through which computers perceive the world. In this process, the role of AI is growing day by day. Based on a profound understanding of perception and edge computing, Axera has focused its attention on smart cities and intelligent driving. In her view, the underlying technologies of the two are interlinked, both requiring artificial intelligence combining visual processing and edge computing, and Axera has accumulated rich capabilities and customer service experience in these two technologies.

The intelligent development of the automotive industry has drawn increasing attention to intelligent driving chips. Faced with this booming industry, Dr. Qiu Xiaoxin shared her insights, stating that the growing intelligence of China's automobiles stems from the explosion of computing power. At present, environmental perception has become the foundation for realizing autonomous driving, and multi-sensor fusion has improved system redundancy and fault tolerance, all of which put forward higher requirements for computing power. With the continuous upgrading of autonomous driving levels, cameras and millimeter-wave radars will occupy an increasing amount of computing power, which presents enormous opportunities for intelligent driving chip manufacturers.

As for the intelligent robotics market, Dr. Qiu Xiaoxin said that although this field has not yet achieved popularization, it has shown a glimmer of hope. From the popular robotic vacuums to industrial robotic arms that replace workers, and to intelligent companions that will enter thousands of households in the future, the popularization of robots is only a matter of time, and every relevant manufacturer should be well prepared for this.

Axera's continuous new breakthroughs in the smart chip field stem from the support of two self-developed core technologies: Axera Smart Vision AI-ISP and Axera Smart Compute mixed-precision NPU. Dr. Qiu Xiaoxin introduced that Axera Smart Vision AI-ISP is the AI-ISP technology pioneered by Axera and the first in the industry to achieve commercial mass production. It AI-enables important modules in ISP such as noise reduction, breaking the ceiling of traditional imaging. In pain point scenarios such as low-light imaging and wide dynamic range, Axera Smart Vision AI-ISP can effectively achieve highlight suppression, color restoration and low-light noise reduction, turning night into day.

Axera Smart Compute mixed-precision NPU has achieved all-round performance optimization, low cost and ease of use based on the co-design of applications, algorithms and hardware. It is reported that Axera Smart Compute mixed-precision NPU is a heterogeneous multi-core system that supports hyper-threading and mixed precision. Among them, mixed precision reduces the obstacles of the memory wall and power wall, thus providing abundant effective computing power under the cost constraints of the edge and end sides and supporting more intelligent algorithms.

At the same time, the Axera Smart Compute mixed-precision NPU toolchain is also highly efficient and easy to use, with prominent advantages such as complete functions, high PTQ quantization accuracy, rich operator support and original model support.

The combination of AI-ISP + NPU forms Axera's technological moat and continuously enriches its product line. Since its establishment in 2019, Axera's AI chips have achieved large-scale shipments in the industry. The newly released list by Gaogong Intelligent Automobile shows that Axera ranks second in the market share of local SoC solutions for standard driving ADAS functions of passenger cars in the Chinese market from January to August 2023.

We hope that the AI we provide is democratized and can make everyone's life better. At the summit, Dr. Qiu Xiaoxin elaborated on Axera's mission and vision. She stated that Axera is committed to building a world-class perception and computing platform, and will strive to make AI migrate from the cloud to the edge and end sides in the future, allowing everyone to benefit from AI.