June 17 to 18, the 2023 China·Nansha International Integrated Circuit Industry Forum (IC NANSHA) themed "Voices of Nansha Chips, Gather Strength for the Future" was successfully held. At the opening ceremony, Dr. Qiu Xiaoxin, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Axera, was invited to deliver a keynote speech entitled "The Vast Starry Sea of Inclusive AI". He shared his insights on edge-side and device-side artificial intelligence with the participants, and interpreted Axera's strategic planning and business layout for the Era 2.0.

Focus on Perception and Computing, Layout Three Core Tracks: Smart City, Intelligent Driving and AIoT

IC NANSHA is an integrated circuit industry forum built in response to the national strategy of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. In June 2022, the State Council officially issued the Overall Plan for Deepening Comprehensive Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Cooperation Facing the World in Guangzhou Nansha, and the first IC NANSHA was held accordingly, becoming a landmark event in the integrated circuit industry. The 2023 IC NANSHA also gathered more than 500 important guests from the semiconductor industry to discuss hot topics and future development opportunities of the integrated circuit industry.

Dr. Qiu Xiaoxin, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Axera Semiconductor

"The end of artificial intelligence will not stay in the cloud; it must exist in a distributed form," Dr. Qiu Xiaoxin stated in his speech. Since the beginning of this year, the boom of large models represented by ChatGPT means that artificial intelligence has entered a new era of navigation, and the semiconductor industry has ushered in new development opportunities. With the combination of large computing power, large models and big data, the sinking intelligence deployed on the edge and device side, closer to users, will become an inevitable trend. Axera is exactly a platform-based chip company supporting edge-side and device-side intelligence.

Dr. Qiu Xiaoxin introduced that in the tide of artificial intelligence, Axera focuses on the development of high-performance, low-power artificial intelligence processor chips for the edge and device side, positioning itself as "a fulcrum to leverage the development of artificial intelligence". Focusing on perception and computing, Axera's visual processing chips not only carry artificial intelligence algorithms, but also face a variety of application scenarios such as smart cities, assisted driving and smart homes, becoming the "digital entrance to the physical world" through perception. 

In the vast visual processing market, Axera takes smart city, intelligent driving and AIoT as its main tracks. Dr. Qiu Xiaoxin said that when Axera started in 2019, it grasped the trend of traditional cameras moving towards high definition and intelligence. By "enabling cameras to see, see clearly and understand", Axera has achieved a steady increase in shipment volume in the smart city chip market.

Talking about the intelligent driving chip market with a value space of tens of billions of US dollars, Dr. Qiu Xiaoxin pointed out that from the current L1/L2, L2+ to the future L4/L5, environmental perception is the foundation of autonomous driving. Multi-sensor fusion can improve the redundancy and fault tolerance of the system, which is consistent with the basic technologies of perception and computing of chips in the smart city field. In today's fierce industry competition, Axera will gain more development opportunities through breakthroughs in differentiated products, more extreme cost performance, and data privacy and security.

Facing the future, Axera further lays out the smart IoT market. In Dr. Qiu Xiaoxin's view, hundreds of millions of terminal devices in the smart Internet of Things are also inseparable from perception and computing. Axera's technology can be applied in more diverse edge and device side scenarios, helping smart devices enter thousands of households.

Led by Two Core Technologies, Let Inclusive AI Create a Better Life

From smart cities and intelligent driving to AIoT, Axera's rapid development is supported by two core technologies: Aixin Zhimou®AI-ISP and hybrid precision NPU.

Dr. Qiu Xiaoxin introduced that Axera's self-developed Aixin Zhimou®AI-ISP has subverted the traditional design. By AI-enabling important modules in the pipeline, it concentrates limited computing power on the most critical and human-visible functions such as denoising, HDR imaging and scene enhancement, thus achieving the optimal effect of the entire AI-ISP and comprehensively improving the imaging effect in various complex application scenarios such as black light. In 2022, Aixin Zhimou®AI-ISP technology was recognized by leading mobile phone brands, and realized 4K night scene video and excellent low-light shooting functions on smartphone terminals in cooperation with main control chips. At the same time, Axera is also leading the new trend of black light full-color camera category, further improving the image processing effect in low-light scenarios.

To meet the high computing power requirements of Aixin Zhimou®AI-ISP's pixel-level processing capability, Axera has independently developed a hybrid precision NPU in parallel. By reducing data movement, Axera's hybrid precision NPU breaks through the barriers of memory wall and power wall. Meanwhile, the joint optimization design based on applications, algorithms and NPU accelerates the implementation efficiency of AI development, with the advantages of high performance, low cost and ease of use. It can not only meet the high-performance requirements of CNN networks, but also is the preferred platform for deploying Transformer on the device and edge side. At present, Axera's AX650N has been adapted to Transformer models including ViT/DeiT, Swin/SwinV2 and DETR, and has achieved an operating speed of more than 30 frames on DINOv2, which makes it more convenient for users to perform detection, classification, segmentation and other operations downstream, and has obvious advantages in power efficiency ratio compared with competitors.

Since its establishment in May 2019, Axera has developed more than three generations of device-edge AI visual processing chips, covering the high, medium and low-end markets with a complete product roadmap to meet customers' product needs in different scenarios. With the implementation of AI large models in edge computing applications, Axera, as a basic computing power platform for artificial intelligence perception and edge computing, will continue to embrace the vast starry sea of AI. Dr. Qiu Xiaoxin said, "Axera's mission is to create a better life with inclusive AI."