Songshan Lake China IC Innovation Summit Forum: Assisting the localization of smart home

Now with the success of Xiaomi's ecological chain, the concept of smart home is becoming more and more popular. In addition, in the home appliances launched in recent years, most manufacturers use "intelligence" and "interconnection" as the selling points of home appliances. At present, my country is still in the research and development stage in the field of smart technology. Although there are a few smart home products that are promoted well, there is no strong technology to support them. In short, the technology in smart home is not mature yet! In addition, the current research and manufacturing costs are also very high.

On May 10, 2019, the 2019 Songshan Lake China IC Innovation Summit Forum was successfully held at the beautiful Hyatt Regency Songshan Lake, Dongguan. For 9 years, the Songshan Lake Forum has been committed to building the most influential IC promotion platform in China. The conference was hosted by the Integrated Circuit Design Branch of the China Semiconductor Industry Association and VeriSilicon Microelectronics (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., and co-organized by Dongguan Songshan Lake Integrated Circuit Design Service Center. This conference focused on the theme of "Smart Home" for the first time.

Dai Weimin, founder, chairman and president of VeriSilicon Microelectronics (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. and vice chairman of the IC Design Branch of the China Semiconductor Industry Association, hosted the forum.

Many domestic IC manufacturers have launched their own new products to jointly promote the localization of smart home. Let's listen to the voices of these new products.

Xm630ai: Smart IoT video processing chip supporting face detection

In the field of artificial intelligence, face recognition technology has a strong ability to continuously iterate. Although there are many reported bugs, the overall technology is moving forward. However, the rapidly growing face recognition industry is still facing the dilemma of no chips available. Among them, GPU, ASIC, DSP and universal chip FPGA are the four most active types.

There are four main processes in face recognition: video acquisition → feature extraction → data comparison → recognition. And after several years of practical testing, it is found that the key to the promotion and application of face recognition among the three major elements of AI is not the algorithm or big data, but the computing power problem that has been subjectively believed to have been solved long ago - the best processor for running the deep learning algorithm of face recognition. Therefore, the chip is the biggest stumbling block to the development of face recognition.

Recently, at the 2019 Songshan Lake China IC Innovation Summit Forum, Hangzhou Xiongmai Integrated Circuit Technology Co., Ltd. showed us the intelligent IoT video processing chip for face detection - Xm630ai. According to Wang Jun, founder and CEO of Hangzhou Xiongmai Integrated Circuit Technology Co., Ltd., this product is positioned as a light intelligent chip, and its main feature is its focus on face recognition. It is an intelligent IoT video processing chip that supports face detection, which can meet a variety of needs and realize the intelligent upgrade needs of home security, doorbells and other devices. It includes video processing functions such as ISP processing, video h.264/h.265 encoding, and lightweight CNN acceleration. The chip has built-in 512-1G DDR3, built-in USB, SDIO, PHY and other interfaces.

The chip can realize two face recognitions per second and is of consumer grade, which can be applied to doorbells and access control to realize intelligent upgrade. Moreover, this chip can be applied in many scenarios: doorbells, attendance machines, smart speakers with screens, etc.

In fact, the demand for home cameras is very large, with monthly shipments reaching tens of millions, and many cameras are trending towards upgrading to smart cameras. In addition, there is also a trend of combining fingerprint locks with videos. Since fingerprint locks have certain security risks, if video detection is used as an auxiliary means, the reliability of smart locks can be greatly improved. It is reported that some manufacturers have already adopted Xiongmai chips to develop similar solutions.

Hangzhou Xiongmai Integrated Circuit Technology Co., Ltd. was established in 2015. It is a professional fabless company. The company has two product lines: coaxial analog video chips and network digital video chips. It has released a number of chips in batches, including XM310, XM320, XM330, XM310V300, XM330V200, XM350, XM380, XM350AI, XM510, XM530AI, and XM550AI.

Wang Jun said that each manufacturer has a different degree of pursuit of gross profit, and foreign companies pay more attention to maximizing profits than domestic and Asia-Pacific companies. In addition, the degree of focus on chip positioning also determines the company's development path. He introduced Xiongmai's two major product lines: only making chips and not algorithms; small scenes and small pain points, get involved first to survive. Xiongmai's industrial planning is very pragmatic, which may be a prerequisite for domestic chip companies to compete with foreign companies.