From April 14th to 16th, electronica China 2021, a grand event in China’s electronics industry, was held at the Shanghai New International Expo Center as scheduled. Imagination Technologies and its partner Xinchi Technology accepted a live video interview with Feiwang at the exhibition, and had an in-depth dialogue ON the topic of “Automotive Chip Industry under the Trend of Intelligent Driving and Intelligent Networking”.
Mr. Liu Guojun, Vice President of Imagination and General Manager of China, participated in this interview on behalf of the company, and discussed topics that the industry is concerned about, such as the lack of cores in the automotive industry, the experience of assisted driving functions, the development environment of local automotive chips, multi-core heterogeneous computing platforms, and the advancement of automotive standards. Lots of great ideas.
Mr. Liu Guojun (middle), vice president of Imagination and general manager of China, Mr. Zhang Qiang (right), chairman of Xinchi Technology, and Ms. Gao Yang, the editor-in-chief of non-net, had an in-depth dialogue
The tide of “lack of cores” makes car factories and chip factories more closely linked
At present, the trend of “lack of cores” in the automobile industry is intensifying. In this regard, Liu Guojun said that this “lack of cores” reflects that the connection between semiconductor chips and the entire automobile industry chain is getting closer and closer, which has prompted OEMs and Tier- 1 Suppliers have begun to pay more attention to chips and even Semiconductor IP. There are even car manufacturers who want to directly enter the chip design and manufacturing supply chain and build their own cores. This is because they are particularly worried about the continuous occurrence of “chip shortages” in the future. affect its own supply system. Zhang Qiang, chairman of Xinchi Technology, said that the occurrence of the “lack of core” incident is related to the development law of the semiconductor industry itself, and is also affected by the current international environment, but no matter what, it shows that the position of the chip in the automotive industry chain is getting more and more important. Importantly, Xinchi Technology is working with industry-leading partners like Imagination to jointly develop automotive chips with stronger functions and better performance to provide greater support for the automotive industry.
Chips are the basis for connected and intelligent automobiles
As more and more assisted driving and even automatic driving functions such as automatic parking and signal recognition are added to cars, the driving experience of consumers is getting better and better. Behind these networked and intelligent functions, chips are providing Basic support, while Imagination provides basic support for the chip through its advanced semiconductor IP.
Liu Guojun introduced that Imagination’s GPU has a high market share in the automotive field. It has long-term cooperation with major automotive chip manufacturers such as Renesas and TI in the world. In China, it also has a partner with great breakthrough and innovation capabilities such as Coretronics. Products such as smart cockpit chips were launched. In terms of autonomous and intelligent driving, Imagination’s next step will be to provide the computing power required for these functions through GPUs and NNAs (Neural Network Accelerators), and will also use its advanced ray tracing technology to bring a new generation of graphics to consumers. , a completely different driving experience from the current one.
Mr. Liu Guojun made a wonderful point of view
Local car chip manufacturers usher in excellent development opportunities
As an IP manufacturer in the upstream of the semiconductor industry, Imagination has always paid close attention to and supported the development of Chinese local chip manufacturers. In Liu Guojun’s view, the current time node is an unprecedented good opportunity for local auto chip manufacturers. have absolute advantages.
In terms of timing, the development of intelligent vehicles and autonomous driving urgently needs support from new technologies and new architectures; in terms of geography, my country is the world’s largest auto market, and there are various local policies to support the development of new technologies; in terms of people, in the past Over the years, major international automotive chip manufacturers have cultivated a large number of talents in China, and these talents are now working on the development of local automotive chips. All these advantages add up to create an excellent development environment.
Imagination’s multi-core heterogeneous platform provides powerful computing power for smart cars
Smart cars or autonomous driving are all based on computing power. Imagination’s two most important IPs currently provide computing power, one is GPU and the other is NNA, and they can be combined to form flexibility and A heterogeneous computing platform with excellent computing power.
Liu Guojun said that heterogeneous computing is a very important trend at present. Taking Imagination’s GPU+NNA as an example, the GPU supports floating-point operations and has a standard API for programming. New algorithm networks can be deployed on the GPU at a low cost; NNA, especially the newly released multi-core NNA, can provide huge computing power. Combining the flexibility of GPU and the high-performance computing power of NNA can fully reflect the advantages of heterogeneity.
Imagination’s GPU+NNA forms a multi-core heterogeneous computing platform
Chinese manufacturers should actively participate in and even lead the development of automotive standards
Liu Guojun also shared his views on how Chinese manufacturers participate in the development of automotive standards. He said that China has been lagging behind in the formulation of many industry standards and norms, especially in high-tech fields. With such a large automobile market in China, China must consider formulating its own norms, and even lead the formulation of international and industry standards and norms, because only from the standards and norms can we truly participate in the global development of the industry and become a global leader By.