The 5th World Semiconductor Conference & Nanjing International Semiconductor Expo was successfully held from July 19th to 21st, 2023. On the afternoon of July 19th, the "2023 Yangtze River Delta Integrated Circuit Industry Innovation and Development Forum" was held in parallel with the conference. Zhang Xing, Senior Director of Axera, attended the forum and delivered a keynote speech entitled The Development of AI-ISP and Edge-side AI.

Hosted jointly by the Department of Industry and Information Technology of Jiangsu Province and the Administrative Committee of Nanjing Jiangbei New Area, this year's conference was themed "Semiconductors: The Link to a New Future". It aimed to present a top-tier industrial event integrating industry exchanges, channel linkage and resource aggregation to the global semiconductor industry.

At the Yangtze River Delta Integrated Circuit Industry Innovation and Development Forum, Zhang Xing introduced the architectural innovation of Axera Smart Vision® AI-ISP: "At present, Axera Smart Vision® AI-ISP empowers the four most critical modules in the ISP Pipeline through AI — HDR, 3DNR, RLTM and Demosaic. That is to say, we continuously improve the performance of these four core modules through AI training, breaking the ceiling of traditional ISP imaging."

In practical applications, Axera Smart Vision® AI-ISP can enhance performance simply by iterating software models, enabling the rapid upgrade of image quality for chip products. This means that Axera can cover different scenarios and markets with a single chip, which not only reduces the comprehensive AI application costs but also brings a tremendous improvement of productivity.

Currently, Axera is not only continuing to optimize and iterate the AI algorithms related to HDR, 3DNR, RLTM and Demosaic, but also exploring the enhancement and AI transformation of other modules in the traditional ISP Pipeline. In addition, Axera Smart Compute® mixed-precision NPU, another core self-developed technology of Axera, delivers outstanding performance in terms of computing power, further accelerating the implementation efficiency of AI development.

Since the beginning of this year, the boom of large models has led AI development into a new stage. Axera believes that driven by the high requirements for real-time performance and reliability of image processing, as well as the demands for privacy protection and security, AI will gradually migrate from the cloud to the edge and end sides in the future, which will also put forward higher requirements for edge and end-side computing power.

Axera Smart Compute® mixed-precision NPU equipped on Axera's third and fourth-generation chips all supports Transformer large models. With the development of large models, Axera is also actively exploring to achieve better AI-ISP effects through large models, and solving the industry's core pain points of low illumination and high dynamic range with technological innovation. New product categories such as the black light full-color camera built with Axera Smart Vision® AI-ISP are also unlocking more visual experiences for people, which is expected to usher in a brand-new era of imaging in the future.