June 8, at the 2023 Gaogong Intelligent Vehicle Developer Conference, Axera, a leading developer of mobile intelligent chips and a basic computing power platform provider, officially announced its entry into the automotive chip market. Gong Huimin, President of Axera's Automotive Business Unit, unveiled the company’s latest automotive product achievements and announced Axera's business layout for intelligent driving.

Founded in May 2019, Axera is committed to building world-leading artificial intelligence chips, boasting two self-developed core technologies: hybrid precision NPU and Aixin Zhimou®AI-ISP. Up to now, the company has successfully developed and mass-produced more than three generations of device-side and edge-side AI chips, accumulating rich experience in product development and mass production.

"In the automotive industry, we start from user value, rely on core technologies, and provide highly competitive products and solutions," said Gong Huimin. It is reported that Axera positions its automotive business as a Tier 2 supplier, offering high-performance and low-power AI SOCs. It provides a full range of solutions for automotive front-view all-in-ones, parking and driving integrated domain controllers, CMS, DMS/OMS and other applications. Meanwhile, Axera has a mature and easy-to-use toolchain, a rich software development platform and application-oriented reference designs to meet the diversified needs of manufacturers.

Gong Huimin, President of Axera's Automotive Business Unit

Hybrid precision NPU and Aixin Zhimou®AI-ISP are Axera's two core technologies. Among them, Axera's proprietary hybrid precision NPU, through rich operator and instruction set optimization, efficient tensor cores and flexible vector cores, not only delivers superior CNN performance, but also endows products with industry-leading BEV and Transformer performance.

In addition, compared with other products, Axera's NPU toolchain is mature and stable with the advantages of high efficiency and ease of use. The original mainstream network models feature high precision and can all run on the NPU without additional operator supplementation by the CPU or model modification. Many customers can get started with the development board in less than an hour and complete the transplantation and development of all algorithms within a month, which greatly reduces the time cost of mass production.

Aixin Zhimou®AI-ISP, pioneered and commercialized in mass production by Axera, on the one hand conducts refined modeling of sensor characteristics and optimizes image processing strategies to the extreme; on the other hand, it fully leverages the data-driven characteristics of AI algorithms to obtain a higher-dimensional effect boost, comprehensively improving the performance of intelligent driving in complex scenarios and helping achieve excellent perception capability. For example, at tunnel entrances and exits, the AI-ISP can quickly track the constantly changing light and make accurate adaptive adjustments to ensure continuous perception and detection of targets such as vehicles and lane lines; in low-light night scenarios, Aixin Zhimou®AI-ISP improves the SNR through algorithm learning and achieves significant signal enhancement to optimize object perception in night scenarios, ensuring driving safety.

At present, Axera has completed the R&D of M55 and M76 series chips, which are applied in CMS, ADAS all-in-ones, single SOC parallel full-time parking and driving integrated domain controllers and other fields. In addition to the advantages of high performance and low power consumption, the products also feature excellent system cost efficiency and all support passive heat dissipation, meeting the development trends and demands of the industry. In the future, the company will also launch high-performance chips for high-level intelligent driving.

Regarding commercial implementation, Gong Huimin introduced that mass production of passenger cars with cooperative automakers has been launched successively since the second quarter of this year, with batch delivery achieved in 2023 and large-scale delivery to be realized in 2024.

Dr. Qiu Xiaoxin, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Axera, stated that Axera will firmly embrace the vast starry sea of AI, focus on perception and computing, and work with partners to bring the ultimate driving experience to users, making inclusive AI a reality ——Better AI, Better Life.