Recently, the 2023 Beijing International Microelectronics Symposium and IC WORLD Conference was held in Beijing. The conference, themed "Forge Core Synergies, Sail Forward with Endeavor", fully integrated resources of the integrated circuit industry and gathered more than 100 experts, scholars and enterprise leaders, aiming to boost the development of the integrated circuit industry towards clustering, industrial chaining and high-endization.

At the special sub-forum on Large Models and Intelligent Computing Chips, Liu Jianwei, Co-founder and Vice President of Axera, was invited to deliver a keynote speech, sharing the company's practical implementation of edge and end-side intelligence with the participants. Axera's high-performance Smart Compute mixed-precision NPU and Axera Pi Pro developer kit garnered wide attention from the audience.

Focus on Perception and Computing, Lay Out Three Business Lines to Drive Democratized Intelligence

As a representative integrated circuit conference in North China, the Beijing International Microelectronics Symposium and IC WORLD Conference has played a pivotal role in promoting international exchanges and cooperation of the microelectronics industry in Beijing and even across China through its authoritative, professional and forward-looking high-level industrial and academic exchanges. The special sub-forum on Large Models and Intelligent Computing Chips was co-hosted by the Beijing Semiconductor Industry Association and a number of intelligent computing chip enterprises, exploring new opportunities for the semiconductor industry in the era of large models.

"Artificial intelligence will definitely be distributed across the cloud, edge and end sides in the future, and intelligence at the end and edge sides may become even more widespread," said Liu Jianwei in his speech. He added that artificial intelligence in the future will not only remain on the cloud, but also sink into various edge and end-side scenarios such as smart homes, smart factories and autonomous driving, and even every individual may have an AI assistant. As a platform-based chip company focusing on perception and computing to support edge and end-side intelligence, Axera holds that perception is to create a digital entry point to the physical world through AI, while computing is to process the massive data generated by perception and make efficient use of the data with AI algorithms.

Founded in 2019, Axera has launched more than four generations of edge and end-side AI vision processing chips, and fully laid out three core fields including smart cities, intelligent driving and intelligent IoT. Among them, in the field of intelligent driving, starting from a mass production-oriented mindset, Axera currently focuses on the L2 and L2++ tracks, and has launched solutions for automotive application scenarios such as ADAS front-view integrated machines, integrated parking and driving domain controllers and CMS. In the field of intelligent IoT, Axera is empowering more possibilities for the future development of the robotics industry.

From smart cities and intelligent driving to smart robots entering thousands of households, the development prospect of democratized intelligence is broad. Liu Jianwei further pointed out in his speech that under the challenges of cost reduction, data security and privacy protection, the demand for local computing power is rising steadily, which puts forward higher requirements for chip design and R&D. Meanwhile, differentiated products, more extreme cost performance and breakthroughs in data privacy and security will also bring more opportunities for chip enterprises.

Led by Two Core Technologies, Axera Pi Pro Facilitates the Exploration of Large Model Deployment

Focusing on perception and computing, Axera has launched two self-developed core technologies: Axera Smart Vision AI-ISP and Axera Smart Compute mixed-precision NPU.

Axera Smart Vision AI-ISP is a pioneering technology invented by Axera and the first AI-ISP technology in the industry to achieve commercial mass production. It AI-enables key modules in the ISP such as denoising, breaking the ceiling of traditional imaging. In complex scenarios such as urban night scene shooting, mining vehicle ADAS and night farmland, Axera Smart Vision AI-ISP can effectively restore colors and reduce noise in low light, making "night as bright as day" and enabling cameras to "see clearly".

Axera Smart Compute mixed-precision NPU realizes all-round performance optimization through the collaborative design of applications, algorithms and hardware, featuring low cost and ease of use. As introduced, Axera Smart Compute mixed-precision NPU is a heterogeneous multi-core system supporting hyper-threading and mixed-precision computing. Among them, mixed-precision computing breaks through the bottlenecks of memory wall and power consumption wall, thus providing abundant effective computing power to support more intelligent algorithms under the cost constraints of edge and end sides.

Meanwhile, the toolchain of Axera Smart Compute mixed-precision NPU is also highly efficient and easy to use, with prominent advantages such as complete functions, high PTQ quantization accuracy, rich operator support and native model compatibility. Liu Jianwei said, "Some customers only took about an hour to write code from scratch to run the first set of results on the development board."

Actual test data show that Axera Smart Compute mixed-precision NPU has obvious performance advantages in deploying traditional CNN networks and Transformer networks commonly adopted by current large models. Among them, the Transformer network SwinT delivers an outstanding performance on Axera's third-generation high-computing-power, high-energy-efficiency SoC chip AX650N, with high performance of 361 FPS, high accuracy of 80.45%, easy deployability with native model and PTQ quantization, and low power consumption of 199 FPS/W, making AX650N the preferred platform for the deployment of Transformer at the edge and end sides.

In addition, to accelerate the efficiency of AI development and deployment at the edge and end sides, Axera has launched the Axera Pi Pro developer kit in cooperation with hardware ecosystem partners. Notably, Axera Pi Pro can meet the industry's demand for high-performance edge intelligent computing, help users quickly conduct product prototype verification and secondary development, and better explore the deployment of Transformer large models.

In the future, Axera will continue to focus on perception and computing, further deepen its layout in business scenarios such as smart cities, intelligent driving and robotics, accelerate the deployment and development of AI at the edge and end sides, and make democratized intelligence truly integrate into all aspects of life for a better world.