Mass production and shipment of simulated storage and calculation! This manufacturer is about to usher in a leapfrog development

Since the official shipment in May 2022, about 10 products based on the WTM2101 chip have been completed by the customer. The cooperative customers are mainly various intelligent wearable device manufacturers with high requirements for computing power, power consumption and application diversification. Nearly one year after entering the market, Zhicun Technology has shipped nearly one million of its customers' products such as TWS headsets, VR headsets and smart watches.

As a new architecture of computing power, the integration of storage and computing can effectively solve the problems of "storage wall" and "power consumption wall" under the traditional von Neumann architecture, and is expected to become one of the advanced productivity in the era of digital economy.

Recently, the reporter of the "Into the Industry Chain" column of Myna Core interviewed Wang Shaodi, the founder and CEO of Zhicun Technology, a leading domestic enterprise integrating savings and accounting. This paper discusses the current development of Zhicun technology enterprises and the prospects for the future development of the industry under the background of the rapid development of AI chips in the post-Moore era.

The leader of the integration of storage and calculation industrialization has shipped nearly a million pieces in less than one year

It is understood that Zhicun Technology was founded in 2017, focusing on the field of integrated storage and computing chips, and is the pioneer and leader of integrated storage and computing industrialization.

As early as 2012, the founding team of the company began to explore the storage-computing integrated chip technology based on NOR Flash. After four years of research in the laboratory, the CTO Guo Xinjie of the company has made the first floating gate storage and computing integrated deep learning chip technology after six times of streaming, and made the first floating gate storage and computing integrated deep learning chip in the world, proving that the storage and computing integrated technology can be used in deep learning.

In 2017, the integrated storage and computing technology began to rise in the industry, and the major international semiconductor design, equipment and production companies began to invest in this technology route. Wang Shaodi realized that the integrated storage and computing technology was about to start its own era, so he finished his post-doctoral research work in advance and returned to China to start his own business in order to realize the commercialization of the integrated storage and computing technology.

After more than two years of research and development, Zhicun Technology launched the company's first intelligent voice chip WTM1001 in 2020 based on NOR Flash's integrated storage and computing chip technology.

WTM1001 is the first integrated architecture chip product in the world. The chip has a power consumption of 300 μ A. The computing power is 20 times that of similar chips on the market. It can directly store and run the neural network. The computing process has no data handling, and the efficiency is nearly 50 times higher than that of traditional AI chips. It can be widely used in low-power AIoT scenarios such as wearable devices and intelligent terminal devices.

Wang Shaodi said.

The first generation of products enabled Zhicun Technology to run through the mass production process of in-store computing chips and achieve a breakthrough from academic research to commercial application.

With the experience of the first generation of products, the company team has been working on the research and development of the second generation of products. In January 2022, Zhicun Technology announced that the integrated storage and computing SoC chip WTM2101 was officially mass produced and successfully launched into the market in March.

As the world's first SoC chip integrated with storage and computing, WTM2101 is based on the technology of integrated storage and computing, and adopts a small package size, which can realize the recognition of hundreds of voice command words at the micro-ampere level, and can realize the NN voice noise reduction algorithm, health monitoring and action recognition algorithm at ultra-low power consumption. The working power consumption in typical application scenarios is at the microwatt level. In addition, the chip can use sub-mW power consumption to complete large-scale deep learning operations, and can cover multiple application scenarios such as speech recognition, speech enhancement, health monitoring, environment recognition, far-field wake-up, motion recognition, visual recognition and event detection.

In-deposit computing product planning of Zhicun Technology

Source: Zhicun Technology

As a relatively new chip design method, the integration of storage and computing also has many difficulties and challenges in the process of commercial application.

With regard to this, Wang Shaodi pointed out that in the process of commercial implementation from 0 to 1, there is no mature experience for reference in many aspects of the integrated storage and computing chip, such as device R&D and manufacturing, circuit design, chip architecture, EDA tool chain, software algorithm ecology, etc. In the process of mass production, stability, process deviation and other aspects need to be explored by the team slowly. We also stepped through many holes and detours in this process, and finally made a breakthrough in this field. However, these experiences also helped Zhicun Technology establish solid and deep technical barriers and first-mover advantages.

In order to accelerate the pace of development and further enhance the competitive advantage, Zhicun Technology has been very active in the semiconductor primary market in recent years. Just a few days ago, there was another good news from Zhicun Technology. The company announced that it had successfully obtained a B2 round of financing of 200 million yuan to accelerate the commercialization process of the integrated storage and computing chip.

Up to now, the company has completed multiple rounds of financing with a total amount of 800 million yuan, and the main investors include well-known institutions such as SMIC Juyuan, iFLYTEK Venture Capital, Hubble Investment, Paradise Silicon Valley, Shenzhen Venture Capital, and SDIC Venture Capital.

With the trust and support of these well-known institutions, Zhicun Technology not only achieved the mass production of in-store computing chips in 2022, but also withstood the market test, helping more than 10 customers develop and realize functional innovation and upgrading based on WTM2101.

Wang Shaodi said that in the future, the company will continue to invest in in-store computing chip R&D iteration and market application expansion, and the shipment volume and market will be expanded simultaneously, moving forward to a 10-fold growth, using in-store computing technology to break the computing bottleneck and continue to enable AI landing.

As a leading company in China that has achieved the commercialization of the integration of storage and computing earlier, Zhicun Technology is also further enriching the software and tool chain to build a good ecosystem of the integration of storage and computing while carrying out product iterations around the WTM series. It is believed that after the completion of the 0-1 validation period, with the gradual expansion of main products and the continuous introduction of new products into the market this year, the company is expected to enter the fast lane of development.