tinyML Asia 2020 Shaojun WEI: The Road to Innovation for AI Chips in China

Plenary: “The Road to Innovation for AI Chips in China"
中国AI芯片的创新之路
Shaojun WEI - Tsinghua University

According to CCID, an industry consulting agency, the China's AI chip market will keep a growth rate of more than 50% in the next three years, and further increase to 30.57 billion yuan in 2021. Driven by the rapid development of the market, China's AI chips continue to attract the attention of industry and academia. A large number of start-up companies have sprung up in China, such as SenseTime, Ali Pingtouge, Cambrian and other start-up enterprises to cut into the emerging subdivision fields, overtake in different lanes, and catch up with international giants, which has attracted extensive attention. Domestic academic circles are also promoting the development of new technology of artificial intelligence chip in China. In recent years, the combination of chips based on traditional computing architecture and various hardware and software acceleration schemes has achieved great success in some scenarios, but the general artificial intelligence chip technology which can flexibly adapt to diverse needs has not yet emerged. Reconfigurable computing technology has the characteristics of real-time dynamic configuration, which makes the software definition no longer limited to the functional level, and the calculation accuracy, performance and energyefficiency of the algorithm can be included in the scope of software definition, which makes the intelligent computing chip not only obtain high flexibility, but also has more advantages in computing energy efficiency. Therefore, in order to better adapt to the characteristics and requirements of intelligent computing and to improve the resource utilization and energy efficiency ratio of neural network computing, highly parallel computing architecture with hardware reconfiguration capability will continue to be a research hotspot. In a word, this field is still in the primary stage of "a hundred schools of thought contend", and there is a huge space for innovation in scientific research and industrial application.