It has been more than seven years since RISC-V was introduced to China. The open source and open features of this instruction set have attracted many CPU enthusiasts to migrate from the semi-open Arm camp.
Some people see the opportunity to become “Chinese Arm”, based on RISC-V self-developed IP cores, trying to promote the commercial implementation of RISC-V by selling IP cores; others see more equal participation in world-class general-purpose high-performance CPU processors Ecological possibility, we plan to develop our own RISC-V high-performance CPU chip when we enter the bureau, hoping to play our own value in the process of RISC-V ecological construction like promoting the open-source Linux operating system.
Jindie Space-Time, which was established in 2021, belongs to the latter. At the beginning of its establishment, it decided to conduct pure self-research from processor cores to chips and software, focusing on the development of a new generation of RISC-V with more integrated architecture, more powerful computing power, and better performance. Performance processors and computing systems.
Recently, this RISC-V chip startup has just completed the Pre A+ round of financing, led by Legend Capital, followed by Matrix Partners, Brizan Ventures, Beyond Ventures, and the previous Pre A round (Matrix Partners). Venture Capital and Yaotu Capital jointly led the investment) and angel round of financing, and have received hundreds of millions of yuan in investment and financing. In the shareholder list of Jindie Time and Space, not only well-known VC institutions such as Jingwei Venture Capital, Legend Capital, Yaotu Capital, All Things Capital, Yunhui Capital, ZhenFund, Beyond Ventures, etc., but also won the With the support of big names in the semiconductor industry and investment such as Gao Bingqiang and Tang Lihua, in the current capital winter, this company has bucked the trend and embarked on a very “very” different financing path.
The founding team continues the leading edge of D1 and is favored by semiconductor investors
Compared with the large chip startups that have been favored by capital in the past two years, the two founders of Jindie Time and Space, Chen Zhijian and Sun Yanbang, can be regarded as non-“normal” chip entrepreneurs, who have no overseas study background and no international experience. Experience working in a chip factory.
Dr. Chen Zhijian graduated from Zhejiang University and entered the semiconductor industry under the guidance of his mentor Yan Xiaolang. He has been engaged in the research and development and industrialization of domestic CPU since 2006. He has more than 10 patents and more than 20 papers in the field of CPU. Tianwei’s CPU research and development work, with the acquisition of Zhongtianwei by Ali, entered Pingtou Ge, and is the main R&D and application person in charge of the domestic embedded CPU Xuantie series.
Sun Yanbang graduated from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. After graduation, he has been engaged in chip software development and customer ecological work in Quanzhi Technology. He has worked for 13 years and has rich experience in software research and development. He has more than 10 patents in the field of basic software and has witnessed many The successful mass production of chips of tens of millions or even hundreds of millions.
At a time when semiconductor investment is collectively cooling, the founder’s “very” background has not only not become an obstacle on the company’s investment and financing road, but has obtained angel investment from semiconductor giants such as Tang Lihua and Gao Bingqiang at the beginning of its establishment.
Tang Lihua is one of the first batch of chip entrepreneurs in China. He successively participated in the founding of Actions and Allwinners, and led the company to go public successfully. It has repeatedly created the record of the first product category in the global market share.
Gao Bingqiang is a world-renowned semiconductor chip expert. He has served as a professor and dean of the University of California, Berkeley and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He has successfully invested in many semiconductor and product companies such as DJI, Montage, Smartway, Broadcom, and Yunjing.
“The support of these semiconductor experts is not because of anything else, but because our team has practical experience from R&D to mass production of RISC-V cores and chips, which is scarce in the current Chinese semiconductor startup circle.” Sun Yanbang told Leifeng.com.
The so-called RISC-V chip’s practical experience from R&D to mass production is the RISC-V chip D1 developed by Allwinner based on the Pingtou Ge Xuantie 906. This chip will be mass-produced in early 2021, and is based on D1’s AIoT The development board Nezha is the world’s first Linux mass-produced product that supports 64bit RISC-V. Chen Zhijian and Sun Yanbang are the project and core directors of D1. “This is only a small step for SoC, but it may be a big step for RISC-V,” Sun Yanbang described his feelings.
Compared with other development boards in the same period, D1 provides large-scale mass production supply and is easy to obtain, which reduces the threshold and cost for RISC-V developers, and plays a huge role in promoting the ecological development of RISC-V, which is used by developers all over the world. Leifeng.com learned that some foreign netizens evaluated the D1 and were surprised that its performance exceeded the Arm chip of the same grade.
It was during the development of D1 that Sun Yanbang saw more possibilities for the CPU.
“In the past, chips were made based on Arm’s cores. From the point of view of the system, there were actually many development needs that could not be met and had to be accepted. However, when developing D1, there was more room to play. We Not only has the number of IP bits been increased from 32 bits to 64 bits, but also a lot of optimizations have been made in vector computing and data throughput, optimizing from a system perspective can bring a completely different experience to applications and customers.” Sun Yanbang said.
The D1 project also allowed Chen Zhijian, who worked in Pingtouge, to meet Sun Yanbang, who was in Quanzhi. D1 solved the predicament that RISC-V was not available for mass-produced AP chips and won a big victory. The two of them had the same vision for the future of RISC-V, believing that RISC-V could create the same ecological value as Linux, and it had the same ecological value as Linux. Chen Zhijian, a Wenzhou native from Entrepreneurial Gene, recalled his mentor Yan Xiaolang’s eloquent teachings back then: “Chip is the most serious field in China right now. If the country has cultivated you, you should have the courage to devote yourself to this industry.”
Facing the historic opportunity of RISC-V, a global open standard, Chen Zhijian left Brother Pingtou and joined like-minded partner Sun Yanbang, and decided to establish a large chip company with RISC-V architecture to truly promote the commercialization of high-performance RISC-V and ecological development.
Knowing that Sun and Chen wanted to start a business, Professor Gao Bingqiang was very supportive. Before the first version of the business plan was fully finalized, he directly indicated to the two that they could provide angel funding support. The amount and valuation were decided by the founder team.
Sun and Chen were encouraged by this, and later asked Professor Gao for advice: “What do you like about our team?”
Professor Gao gave an answer from the perspective of investment and industrial development prediction: ” I have not invested in semiconductors for many years, but have been investing in applications. Only RISC-V will allow me to invest in semiconductors again. RISC-V must be the future. Opportunity to create a world-class enterprise, and this enterprise must be in China, because only China has the most future-oriented applications. To make RISC-V, we must have the ability to customize the design of the processor core, and at the same time we must With solid market landing ability, your combination is the best.”
Tang Lihua is the first executive of a listed chip company to pay attention to RISC-V. He has always been optimistic about the commercialization and mass production of high-performance RISC-V CPUs. Therefore, he also supports the entrepreneurial plans of old friends Chen Zhijian and Sun Yanbang.
Aim at emerging fields such as robotics, and open up an incremental market for high-performance CPUs
China has long been controlled by others in terms of the CPU instruction set, but the open standard of the RISC-V instruction set has given all individuals and institutions an equal opportunity to develop CPUs. Therefore, in the seven years since RISC-V was introduced to China, many RISC-V players, these players mostly focus on developing and selling small RISC-V IP cores, hoping to emulate Arm’s business model.
However, the ecological development of RISC-V is still insufficiently motivated. The open source and open ecological construction requires a high-performance processor that can support large-scale software in the early stage. The status quo is that although everyone is optimistic about the development of RISC-V, in terms of action Most are watching – the financial resources of small companies can often only support their research and development of small core IP, and large companies are also slightly conservative in their investment in RISC-V before it is clear whether it can bring huge commercial profits to them. Semiconductor companies generally The lack of software capabilities is even more prohibitive. No one is willing to take risks when the existing business revenue is stable. Therefore, even if there are players like Pingtou who are willing to give up IP licensing fees in the short term and open source their RISC-V processors, There is still little investment in high-performance RISC-V chips in the industry.
Concerns about the commercialization of RISC-V often revolve around a problem: both X86 and Arm have established mature ecosystems, and they dominate the PC and mobile terminals respectively, and are launching new competitions in the server field. Does RISC-V really have a chance in the high-performance field?
When the public discussion is still stuck on whether RISC-V can finally shine on the PC side, mobile side or server side, Jindie Time Space has already focused its attention on a more open future.
“Each generation of architecture develops symbiotically with new applications in the future. The X86 architecture grows with the era of computers and the Internet. The Arm architecture has become the mainstream architecture in mobile phones because of the mobile Internet. The next era will be from connecting people to connecting things. It is an era of intelligence and interconnection of all things. From the Internet to the mobile Internet to the Internet of Things, on the one hand, the number of terminals in each era will increase by more than ten times, on the other hand, it is more open to the underlying technology requirements. X86 and Windows in the Internet era are closed, Arm in the mobile Internet era is semi-closed, and Android OS is also semi-open. In the era of the Internet of Everything, both CPU architecture and OS hope to be completely open. The single terminal form of RISC-V is different, the next era will present diversified scenarios and applications, and the openness and DSA features of RISC-V can better meet the requirements of the next era.” Chen Zhijian said.
“Usually everyone’s understanding of chips in the era of the Internet of Everything may be IoT chips with low computing power. This understanding may be a bit one-sided. The computing power requirements of intelligent IoT are various. For example, a smart car is a typical super-powerful intelligent object. It requires very high computing power. In the next era, there will be more new application forms, such as pan-intelligent robots, edge computing nodes, intelligent industrial and commercial scenarios, cloud computers and cloud mobile phones, etc., with a more open architecture , more diverse software, larger and more efficient computing power is the trend of the next era.”
“In the future, the computing power demand of the pan-IoT side will inevitably increase, the cloud computing computing power will inevitably sink, and the future computing power form and computing power structure will be reconstructed. The RISC-V chips that advance in space and time are aimed at new applications. The fields include pan-intelligent robots, new edge computing nodes, etc. The future intelligent robots, humanoid robots, low-speed intelligent vehicles, etc. are all areas we are optimistic about . Tesla released the Optimus humanoid robot two days ago, which also reflects the future world trend. perception, which coincides with our view.”
Chen Zhijian also revealed the company’s current research and development progress. ” The computing power of our first-generation products will exceed the performance of the original D1 by 200 times, and the server-level RISC-V processor core project has also been launched, and both chip and software development are in progress. “
During his work at Quanzhi, Sun Yanbang participated in the cooperative development of several customer products of sweepers, and witnessed the explosive growth and intelligence of sweeping robots in recent years. The primary form of the sweeping robot is a collision type, without the function of obstacle avoidance and path planning. When it encounters an object, it will bounce back and continue to clean. This kind of product only needs an MCU-level main control chip, but the current high-end sweeper Robots have developed to quad-core processors and 4T computing power requirements. Functionally, they need to support multi-channel camera input, intelligent object recognition, path planning and obstacle avoidance. “The continuous growth of computing power demand is the eternal demand for electronic products,” said Sun Yanbang.
If the scope of quasi-robots is further expanded, the product form has not yet fully emerged in the market targeted by Diespace. However, Sun Yanbang, who has participated in and witnessed the moment when Allwinner Technology seizes the opportunity in the tablet market, is full of confidence in the future, and firmly believes that quasi-robots will definitely become It is the representative of the intelligent future, and it will definitely become one of the important markets for RISC-V. “We must plan ahead for the future, and ecology is never something that can be grasped by latecomers.”
Challenges to application areas that have not yet been fully implemented means potentially higher uncertainty, and the risks are as great as the opportunities are. Therefore, Chen Zhijian and Sun Yanbang’s entrepreneurial plans are also regarded as “advanced” by many people, but Chen Zhijian is very firm in this regard: ” I believe in what Steve Jobs said, if you think something is meaningful, you must immediately Do it. Work hard to make something truly meaningful to the industry and society, and success is inevitable.”
In order to respond quickly before the opportunity comes, the team has made adequate preparations in the team, and has already set up an IP R&D team, a chip system team and a full-stack software team. In order to speed up the research and development progress, the RISC-V IP core development and software development of Advanced Timespace are carried out simultaneously. In the demo demonstration to Leifeng.com, the Advanced Timespace team has been able to successfully run large-scale computer software based on the RISC-V chip platform. Open websites and play videos, etc.
“As the founder of a Chinese computing chip company, I myself aspire and firmly believe that a world-class computing ecological enterprise will be born in China based on the RISC-V architecture. Our vision is to grow into a world-class computing company with the development of RISC-V. Ecological giants. This is our era.” Chen Zhijian said at the end of his exchange with Leifeng.com.
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