Recently,2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) Smart Driving Forum, one of the themed forums, was held in Shanghai. With the theme of "Unlimited Digital Connection, Boundless Intelligent Driving", the forum conducted in-depth discussions on industry hot topics such as new unmanned technologies, new digital foundations and generative new ecology. Axera was invited to attend and delivered a keynote speech entitled "Evolution and Innovation of Mobile Intelligent Chips".

Entering the era of intelligent vehicles, the demand for automotive chips is constantly increasing, and the pattern of the automotive industry ecosystem and core supply chain is accelerating its restructuring. According to the data from GGAI, in 2022, the market share of self-owned brand passenger vehicles rose to 49.9%. The pre-installed standard ADAS (L0-L2) on domestic passenger vehicles exceeded 10 million units for the first time, with the pre-installation rate breaking through the 50% mark. Axera believes that this indicates a broad value space for mass-produced L2-level intelligent driving solutions.

Regarding the main factors affecting the development of the intelligent driving market, Axera has put forward four core elements: policy, technology, cost and supply chain. In terms of cost, under the market demand of "what you see is what you get" and "ready to use upon purchase", cost reduction has become the core idea of many intelligent driving routes; in terms of the supply chain, localization will become a long-term trend. Facing the increasingly fierce competition in the intelligent driving industry, differentiated products and solutions, more extreme cost performance and data privacy and security will bring more opportunities for enterprises in the intelligent driving industry.

Founded in 2019, Axera has researched and developed and mass-produced four generations of multiple chip products. In the intelligent driving track, Axera is positioned as a Tier2 enterprise. Relying on the advantages of two self-developed core technologies, the industry-leading Aixin Zhimou®AI-ISP and Axera's Hybrid Precision NPU, Axera provides customers with high-performance, low-power consumption edge-side AI chips and more differentiated, higher cost-effective intelligent driving solutions.

At present, Axera's automotive chip products are constantly evolving to correspond to the four levels of L0-L2, L2+, L2++ and L3-L4 in the intelligent driving market. It is reported that the M55 series chips are for the L0-L2 stage and have been mass-produced and installed on vehicles in 2023; the M76 series chips are targeted at the L2+ level intelligent driving market, which is expected to pass the automotive-grade certification in early next year. It is in a leading position in the industry in terms of Transformer algorithm performance and power consumption when running, with a current computing power of 60TOPS. For higher-level intelligent driving stages such as urban NOA, Axera will also launch higher-level intelligent driving chips one after another.

Technically, Axera's Hybrid Precision NPU supports INT4/INT8/INT16 computing precision, with flexible vector cores and efficient tensor cores. It not only provides super strong CNN performance, but also has industry-leading BEV and Transformer performance. At the same time, the quality of the toolchain determines the implementation efficiency of the NPU. Supported by a large number of projects, Axera has also polished an easy-to-use and efficient Hybrid Precision NPU toolchain, which has been highly recognized by customers: "It only takes one hour to get the first set of results on the development board from zero foundation."

Centering on the two core technologies and a series of automotive chips, Axera has launched automotive application-oriented solutions such as intelligent front view system, single-SoC parallel full-time parking and driving integration system, CMS electronic exterior mirror system, and DMS&OMS two-in-one system, and has achieved phased results in commercial implementation. It obtained the first fixed-point vehicle model in 2022, realized batch delivery in 2023, and will achieve large-scale delivery in 2024.

At present, electrification, intellectualization and connectivity have become the mainstream of technological innovation in the automotive industry. The automotive industry is expected to usher in a broader industrial service ecosystem, and form a new round of competition and cooperation layout under a new software and hardware technology system and a complete standard and regulatory system. Axera's automotive chips can support customers to build models with an ultimate driving and riding experience. In the future, Axera will continue to work with OEM and Tier1 partners to build an open and inclusive cooperation ecosystem and boost the high-quality development of the intelligent driving industry.