On January 5, the 2022 Hengqin-Zhuhai-Macao Integrated Circuit Industry Promotion Summit and the 17th "China Core" Award Ceremony kicked off in the Hengqin Guangdong-Macao In-Depth Cooperation Zone. With the theme of "Open Innovation for Chips, Win-Win through Collaboration", the conference gathered numerous industry experts to jointly review the future development direction of domestic integrated circuit products and technologies. Axera's self-developed edge-side intelligent chip AX620A stood out from 334 participating products of 227 outstanding enterprises, winning the "China Core" Excellent Technological Innovation Product Award and gaining dual recognition from the industry and the market once again.

Guided by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and hosted by the China Center for Information Industry Development, the "China Core" selection is an authoritative industry event, and one of the most influential and authoritative industry conferences in China's integrated circuit field. It aims to build a centralized display platform for excellent products of Chinese integrated circuit enterprises, create a high-end public brand for China's integrated circuit industry, and promote the development of the industry. The Excellent Technological Innovation Product Award is mainly for single new products successfully developed in the past two years, featuring strong technological innovation, independent intellectual property rights, and positive benefits for improving the independent supply chain.

Axera's award-winning core advantage lies in its two self-developed technologies — mixed-precision NPU and Axera Smart Vision® AI-ISP, which perfectly balance power consumption and computing power for edge and end-side intelligent chips, and achieve imaging effects beyond traditional standards. These advantages endow the AX620A chip with groundbreaking performance, fulfilling Axera's commitment to continuously boosting the development of the "China Core" industry.

Specifically, the award-winning AX620A is Axera's second-generation self-developed edge-side intelligent chip, equipped with a quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU and a NPU with 14.4TOPs@INT4 or 3.6TOPs@INT8 computing power. Featuring fast wake-up and low power consumption, it meets application demands in various scenarios such as AI cameras, AI industrial cameras and intelligent recognition terminals, maintaining a leading edge among numerous edge and end-side chips.

Notably, based on the AX620A chip, Axera has launched the AXera-Pi™ development board for the open source ecosystem community in collaboration with ecological partners. It delivers high-quality imaging effects such as night scene enhancement and supports a rich set of operators, providing an optimized development experience for developers and accelerating the commercial implementation of AI in edge and end-side scenarios. Meanwhile, Axera has built an open source ecological community and released corresponding open source software projects to improve platform efficiency and enrich the end-side AI algorithm ecosystem. Currently, Axera's open source ecological construction is still being further improved, which will play an important role in empowering the accelerated development of AI in the future.

As a developer of AI visual perception chips and a basic computing power platform provider, Axera has built a full-functional team covering chip design, R&D and production. All core members have participated in the design and production of more than 10 chips, boasting rich experience in product planning and implementation. In the three years since its establishment, the company has successfully developed and mass-produced three generations of multiple edge and end-side intelligent vision chips, achieving commercial implementation in three major fields: smart city, smart consumption and intelligent transportation.

The rapid independent R&D and mass production of chips are the key to driving the fast development of the intelligent economy, building a strategic, fundamental and pioneering industry, and also the cornerstone for the further breakthrough and large-scale, universal implementation of intelligent applications, which is of great significance to national scientific and technological development. The successive "China Core" excellent product collection activities have concentratedly demonstrated the development trends of domestic leading integrated circuit products and technologies. The AX620A chip's award is the fruit of Axera's long-term adherence to independent innovation. In the future, Axera will continue to explore technological innovation in visual intelligent chips, provide more flexible and convenient deployment solutions and chip products with extensive application value, and work with all industrial parties to explore the future of edge intelligence with a more complete and open software and hardware ecosystem.