China's IC unicorn announced, the storage and computing integrated chip company Zhicun Technology has entered the list
The 2021-2022 (fifth) China IC Unicorn List was announced, and Zhicun Technology, the leading company in the storage and computing integrated chip technology, entered the list for the first time. As a credible and influential selection activity in the domestic integrated circuit field, the inclusion of Zhicun Technology not only means that the competitiveness and investment value of the company has been highly recognized by the industry and academia, but also represents the rapid development of the commercialization process of the integration of storage and computing. And the huge market potential has attracted more and more industry attention.
China's IC unicorn announced, the storage and computing integrated chip company Zhicun Technology has entered the list
Aim at the bottleneck of the industry and directly hit the pain point of the market
According to data released by the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics Organization, the global market size in 2021 will exceed US$550 billion, a year-on-year increase of more than 25%. However, with the advent of the era of high computing power and big data, the problem of storage walls has become more and more prominent. Start-ups represented by Zhicun Technology have developed an integrated storage-computing architecture and innovatively used Flash memory to complete the storage and computing of neural networks. Effectively solve the storage wall problem, improve computing efficiency and reduce costs.
Ten years of accumulation and exploration to achieve innovation
In 2012, there was no mainstream direction or mainstream architecture for the integration of storage and computing. The founding team of Zhicun Technology began to develop the design of analog in-memory computing chips and tried tape-out. After several tape-out iterations, the world's first Flash in-memory computing was realized in 2016. verification of the chip. After the establishment of Zhicun Technology, after 4 years of independent innovation, and further, the world's first in-memory computing chip WTM2101 has been successfully mass-produced and shipped.
The WTM2101 chip has both ultra-low power consumption and high computing power, and can realize eight main application scenarios and solutions of speech recognition, speech enhancement, health monitoring, environment recognition, far-field wake-up, motion recognition, visual recognition, and event detection. It is applied to smart wearable devices that have higher requirements for computing power, power consumption, and application diversification. It is reported that the WTM2101 chip has been implemented in many wearable device categories such as smart watches and wireless headphones, and the annual output and sales volume can reach millions.
China's IC unicorn announced, the storage and computing integrated chip company Zhicun Technology has entered the list
Continuous iterative upgrade to promote industrial development
In terms of product matrix, Zhicun Technology will start research and development of WTM8 series chips for higher-performance video enhancement scenarios in 2021. The new architecture can increase the computing power by 80 times in a single core and increase the efficiency by 10 times. At present, the verification chip has been returned to the chip, and the chip product release is expected to be completed next year.
In the field of application, Zhicun Technology founder and CEO Wang Shaodi also mentioned in an interview with the media that in addition to the existing products aimed at the consumer electronics market, Zhicun Technology is also trying to improve the reliability of products towards the automotive standard. Iterates on the level criteria.
China's IC unicorn announced, the storage and computing integrated chip company Zhicun Technology has entered the list
At present, Zhicun Technology has received multiple rounds of investment of 600 million yuan including Hubble, SMIC Juyuan, Xunfei Investment, Shenzhen Venture Capital, SDIC Venture Capital, Puhua Capital, China Merchants Group, etc., confirming the integration of storage and computing On the chip track, we know the first mover and technical advantages of the technology. It is reported that Zhicun Technology will attend the 2022 World Semiconductor Conference and participate in the 5th China IC Unicorn Forum held at the same time.