Aixin Technology CEO Qiu Xiaoxin attended the 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference

Aixin Technology CEO Qiu Xiaoxin attended the 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference to promote the rapid development of edge and device AI chips

Shanghai, China, July 9, 2021 - The 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference opened yesterday, and Dr. Qiu Xiaoxin, Chairman and CEO of Aixin Technology, a domestic artificial intelligence vision chip startup, was invited to attend. At the conference's head forum "Smart Chips Define the Future of the Industry", Dr. Qiu participated in the roundtable discussion on "Creating AI, Starting with the Chip but Not Just the Chip" and spoke. She revealed at the meeting that Aixin Technology's second chip is in the process of tape-out and will soon be returned. Qiu Xiaoxin said, "Aixin Technology hopes to do its best to provide support on the edge and end sides for the world's digital and intelligent new infrastructure."

The theme of this World Artificial Intelligence Conference is "AI Empowers Urban Digital Transformation". It discusses the cutting-edge progress of artificial intelligence technology innovation and industrial implementation, widely conveys the concept and value of urban digital transformation, and promotes the formation of global consensus on relevant governance and norms. Public information shows that the conference was attended by 49 domestic academicians, 13 foreign academicians, 16 university presidents, 25 presidents of national professional societies and associations, and nearly 150 founders and CEOs of leading technology companies, central enterprises and state-owned enterprises, unicorns and emerging companies in the field. Among them, the "Smart Chip Defines the Future of the Industry Forum" is one of the top forums of this conference. More than 600 manufacturers and academic representatives from upstream and downstream of the artificial intelligence (AI) chip industry chain attended the conference.

At the forum, Qiu Xiaoxin said that in the past few years, computing power has gradually shifted from the cloud to the edge and end sides, and cloud, edge, and end collaboration has become the mainstream of development. Aixin Technology's chip research and development also adheres to this direction. "So Aixin can be defined as: an AI computing power basic computing platform focusing on the edge and end sides."

Public data shows that the first chip independently developed by Aixin Technology, AX630A, is a high-performance, low-power artificial intelligence visual processor chip with a power consumption of only about 3W. It can achieve 57.6TOPS@800MHz 2w4f computing power, and the equivalent computing power reaches 28.8TOPS@800MHz INT4. Under different networks, AX630A processes 3116 and 1356 frames per second respectively, far exceeding other similar chip products, and is widely used in hardware devices such as smart cameras, smart analysis boxes, smart acceleration cards, sports cameras, and translation pens.

On the road of AI development, discussing the form of chips is an important issue. Qiu Xiaoxin believes that the edge and end sides prefer dedicated chips to meet the constraints of power consumption, area, and cost, and achieve vertical integration of applications. "AiXin Technology mainly focuses on the direction of artificial intelligence visual processing, so we will optimize the overall architecture of AiXin chips 'specially' for visual processing."

It is reported that Aixin Technology has introduced AI into ISP in chip design, enabling ISP to be continuously trained; AI ISP has broken through the bottleneck of traditional ISP, enhancing picture quality and making images clearer; storage and computing collaborative design reduces DDR reading and writing, saving memory bandwidth; mixed precision deep learning and proprietary network acceleration unit allow the chip and algorithm to be perfectly integrated; VPU (new visual processing unit) can realize intelligent video encoding, efficient video compression, and save video storage.

At the forum, the guests discussed the industry prospects that practitioners are most concerned about. In this regard, Qiu Xiaoxin said, "The edge side is indeed in a state of flourishing, because the applications on the edge side are diverse, so in each segment, a new company may emerge to focus on chip research and development in that segment." While affirming the potential of start-ups, she also proposed that chips need to be scaled up to generate profits, which leads to the industry development trend of mergers and acquisitions: "Currently, there are few small companies in foreign chip companies, but there are many platform chip companies. Platformization can enhance the risk resistance of enterprises, and after scale, it has cost advantages and makes sufficient financial reserves for research and development." She believes that the Chinese chip market is currently in a state of flourishing, and this state has very strong vitality at this stage. In a few years, after market verification, the industry may gradually move towards integration.

Participants also looked forward to whether AI chips can break through Moore's Law. Qiu Xiaoxin provided another perspective on this issue: "It is not a smart approach to compete purely in computing power, because the actual utilization rate of NPU is currently about 15%, and at most 20%, which is actually a huge waste of the entire AI computing power." In this regard, Aixin Technology's approach is to improve the energy efficiency ratio on the end side and edge side. For example, based on the limited physical core, the utilization rate is increased to 50% or even 80% as much as possible, so as to obtain four times or more computing power. "How to improve the energy efficiency ratio is a very important research direction for us," said Qiu Xiaoxin.

At the end of the forum, when looking forward to the future development of the industry, Qiu Xiaoxin described AI chip companies as enablers. "We collect information from the world around us in the most effective way and make effective judgments and controls based on this information. I believe that this market itself is very broad, and the further implementation of AI applications can also bring very profound changes to society."

About Aixin Technology

Aixin Technology was founded in May 2019 and is committed to building the world's leading AI chips. Aixin has formed a full-featured team from chip design, R&D to production. The core members have participated in the design and production of more than 10 chips and have rich experience in product planning and product implementation.

Aixin focuses on the research and development of high-performance, low-power AI visual processor chips, and independently develops neural network processors for inference acceleration. Combining powerful computing power with ultra-low power consumption, Aixin improves image quality through neural networks and supports a variety of AI visual tasks such as object detection and face recognition.

Based on the vertical integration of algorithms, chips, and products, Aixin Technology provides partners with full-stack solutions to help customers quickly implement the latest technologies. The company's core technology products are widely used in smart cities, smart retail, smart communities, smart homes, IoT devices and other fields.