Is it possible to overtake on a curve?
Some people say that when overtaking on a curve, if you overtake nine times out of ten, you should change lanes and overtake.
Some people also say that corners can be overtaken.
Behind the frequent discussion of overtaking on curves, people have a question in their minds. Can China’s hard technology industry represented by chips surpass the global leaders?
“It is possible to overtake on a curve, the key is how to overtake.” Fu Yong, chief technology officer of Xinhuazhang Technology, said, “If we follow suit, it will be difficult to overtake, but it is not impossible to achieve overtaking in an innovative and differentiated way.”
The EDA (electronic design automation) industry in which Xinhuazhang is located is monopolized by the three EDA giants. It is obvious that it is difficult to achieve a breakthrough in the market dominated by the giants.
However, HuaPro P2E, a high-performance FPGA dual-mode verification system recently launched by Xinhuazhang, has proved the possibility of breaking through the chip neck technology and realizing the possibility of domestic EDA overtaking with innovative products.
In addition, it has won hundreds of millions of yuan in the B round of financing in the cold capital winter, which also gives more people a reason to be optimistic about domestic EDA.
Digital verification, an opportunity for domestic EDA to overtake
The chip industry is a “three high” industry with high technology threshold, high capital investment and high talent requirements.
EDA, known as the “crown jewel” of the semiconductor industry, has a higher threshold. After years of hard work, domestic EDA companies have achieved limited results in the EDA market dominated by the three giants.
However, with the increasing scale of chips and the industry’s increasing demand for shortening the chip iteration cycle, new requirements have been put forward for EDA, which is also an opportunity for domestic EDA to overtake.
According to different application links, there are many types of EDA, such as analog EDA, RF EDA, and digital design EDA. Among them, verification EDA has become a popular field in recent years, and even EDA giants have begun to launch new EDA products.
It is not complicated to verify the logic of EDA becoming a popular arena. With the increase of chip scale, the methodology and requirements for solving chip design challenges are getting higher and higher. Traditional EDA software simulation has encountered a bottleneck.
“Digital chip verification has three core products—logic simulation, hardware simulation, and prototype verification.” Fu Yong said, “The entire verification process is quite complicated, especially for VLSI verification. It is very important to improve verification efficiency.”
” We are the first in the industry to propose agile verification. This is because 70% of the verification time is currently spent on RTL verification, which is a pain point in the market that we want to solve.” Fu Yong further said, “Agile verification is a very important concept, including The three core elements are fast iteration, early system-level verification, unified data and debugging methods. ”
Improving verification efficiency is an opportunity seen by the industry, and it should be a bottom-up change to achieve transcendence.
Xie Zhonghui, chief market strategy officer of Xinhuazhang Technology, pointed out, ” Our ultimate goal is to surpass traditional EDA tools, and we have to make a lot of preparations to achieve the transcendence. Our preparation is to start from the underlying technology, in order to break the fragments of EDA tools To solve the problem of optimization, a unified database, a unified compiler, a unified debugging tool, and cloud-native deployment have been created.”
Last year, Xinhuazhang released 4 products and 1 platform. In May this year, it released a system debugging tool. Recently, Xinhuazhang launched its sixth product, which is also an EDA product that may have epoch-making significance.
Looking back 10 years later, it may be a “dual-mode” innovation that subverts EDA
” After 10 years, you will find that all verification tools will be different. The new dual-mode HuaPro P2E we just released is likely to be another disruptive product, because there is no similar tool in the industry. There are more than 200 excellent engineers in Xinhuazhang, based on the deep accumulation and insights of the original traditional methodology, coupled with a lot of innovation, it took two years to develop and develop products with epoch-making value.” Fu Yong gave such a high evaluation to his new products.
The dual mode of Huajie HuaPro P2E refers to meeting the needs of both system debugging and software development, and solves the problem of integrating and balancing the two verification tools of prototype verification and hardware emulation.
Traditional EDA design tools, hardware simulation and prototype verification are different EDA tools. Chip engineers need to switch between multiple EDA tools to complete verification, which not only consumes manpower, but also brings about the problem of data fragmentation, which directly reduces the possibility of verification reuse. The verification efficiency is greatly reduced.
In fact, this is the choice of EDA development history. Due to the continuous evolution of technology and demand in the chip industry, and the current EDA giants have acquired many EDA point tool companies, logic simulation, hardware simulation, and prototype verification have been formed in the verification process. Three important product lines.
Integrating and verifying EDA is not an insurmountable problem from a technical perspective. At least the launch of Huajie HuaPro P2E has proved the feasibility of solving this challenge.
Leifeng.com learned that the key to Huajie HuaPro P2E’s ability to achieve dual working modes is the integrated and fully automatic HPE Compiler independently developed by Xinhuazhang. This is a compiler that supports automatic synthesis, intelligent segmentation, and optimized implementation of large-scale designs, and supports multiple debugging capabilities such as deep debugging, unlimited, arbitrary depth signal waveform acquisition, dynamic triggering, memory loading and reading, etc. It is understood that this product has applied for more than dozens of hardware verification system product patents, of which 23 have been approved.
Chen Lanbing, vice president of R&D of Xinhuazhang, said, “Compared with traditional prototyping tools, HuaPro P2E is based on unified hardware and software tools, efficiently integrates dual modes of prototyping and hardware emulation, and provides an agile verification solution with both flexibility and efficiency. , GPU, AI, HPC and other large-scale chip development, providing a new generation of intelligent pre-silicon verification hardware systems with large capacity, high performance, and strong debugging capabilities.”
According to the actual test data of Xinhuazhang, HuaPro P2E can shorten the verification cycle by 30%-50% through a one-click process.
“This extended and integrated dual-mode product from prototype verification to hardware simulation has filled the gap in the previous Xinhuazhang tool chain, and it is also a milestone in the planning and layout of our products.” Xie Zhonghui also said, “Our products not only Just follow, as a latecomer, we must stand at a higher technical starting point and make differentiated products. Of course, we must differentiate in the current mainstream methodology to meet the requirements of the market, and if we are too advanced, we will follow The needs of the customer did not match. ”
Leifeng.com also noticed that HuaPro P2E is an evolution product of HuaPro P1 launched last year. Why does Xinhuazhang iterate a product in such a short time?
Xie Zhonghui explained, “The two products are aimed at different subdivided needs of users. The two products have continuity and inheritance as well as differentiation. They can not only meet the current needs of customers, but also meet the needs of customers in the future.”
It is necessary to take into account the application needs of the market while maintaining innovation. This seems to be a promising development path, and walking on the right path is also a key to Xinhuazhang’s ability to obtain hundreds of millions of yuan in financing during the capital winter. With the release of this new product, Xinhuazhang has further improved their product layout in the digital verification process tool chain.
The key to successful overtaking of domestic EDA
As a “three high” industry, domestic EDA companies need not only strong technical strength and correct technical route to achieve breakthroughs, but also capital support, appropriate market strategy and forward-looking layout.
Since its establishment in 2020, Xinhuazhang has been widely favored by capital. Even in the cold winter of capital in 2022, it announced on November 27 that it has completed a round of financing of several hundred million yuan led by Zhongdian Zhongjin Fund, a subsidiary of CICC Capital.
Xie Zhonghui believes that there are three key reasons for the capital’s recognition of Xinhuazhang. One is capital’s recognition of the semiconductor industry, especially digital verification EDA; The customer’s product has landed; of course, investors also recognize the future development potential of Xinhuazhang, including the agile verification proposed by Xinhuazhang and the future potential of EDA2.0.
Today, Xinhuazhang is the largest company focusing on digital verification EDA in China, which also benefits from the acquisition of Shunyao Electronics with the support of capital, and has achieved a better product and production strategy layout.
Fu Yong, the founder of Shunyao Electronics and now the chief technology officer of Xinhuazhang, expressed his open attitude towards mergers and acquisitions when communicating with Leifeng.com before. Regarding the choice of integration with Xinhuazhang, Fu Yong summed it up as “the finishing touch”.
“If you want to develop China’s EDA industry, you must have an overall dragon body. From the beginning, Xinhuazhang has invested a lot of manpower in product research and development and customer service. After this platform is established, it seems to have ‘Dragon’, combined with the ‘finishing point’ of Shunyao, has formed a unique and complete verification platform.” Fu Yong said,
“The two companies can achieve a good integration, because the cultures of the two companies match and the products complement each other. In addition, we are both determined to be a good digital verification tool in China. I believe we will be able to achieve one plus one greater than two.”
Xie Zhonghui also said, “After in-depth research by the technical team and the product team, we believe that the market strategies and product strategies of the two companies are also very compatible.”
At the product level, both companies make differentiated products that are not available in the market. The characteristics and concepts are very consistent, and the technology can also be integrated from the underlying architecture.
Focusing on the present, the most important thing for domestic EDA is to serve customers well and meet the differentiated needs of customers. It can be seen that even in the second half of 2022 when the domestic epidemic will bring many uncertainties, Xinhuazhang still insists on holding two offline communication activities in Shanghai and Shenzhen. “Offline seminars can bring our products to customers and communicate with them face to face. This is the embodiment of our customer-oriented strategy. The running-in and iteration of our products also requires in-depth communication with customers.” Fu Yong said.
Focusing on the future, Xinhuazhang established the Xinhuazhang Research Institute focusing on cutting-edge technologies this year. At this press conference, topics such as quantum computing, privacy computing, and optical computing seemed to vaguely reveal the technological ambitions of Xinhuazhang. What is certain is that these cutting-edge technologies are an opportunity for China’s computing industry, and of course an opportunity for domestic EDA to overtake.
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