Zhongke Haoxin explains the industry's first RISC-V-based DSP

Recently, during the 2021 China Integrated Circuit Design Innovation Conference and IC Application Expo (ICDIA), Zhongke Haoxin co-founder & deputy general manager Wu Junning and assistant general manager & sales director Wang Kai accepted media interviews and interpreted the first RISC-V DSP product launched by Zhongke Haoxin.

Wu Junning, Co-founder and Deputy General Manager of Zhongke Haoxin

Wang Kai, Assistant General Manager & Sales Director of Zhongke Haoxin

Wang Kai, assistant general manager and sales director of Zhongke Haoxin, said that although DSP chips have been around for many years, there is still huge market space in traditional industrial control and emerging consumer electronics, new energy and other fields; most of the market share is occupied by international competitors, and some domestic companies have tried to break through, but due to intellectual property, ecological or technical issues, they have not achieved significant results.

Relying on the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhongke Haoxin has been developing DSP-based products in recent years. It started research on RISC-V very early and mass-produced the industry's first RISC-V-based DSP chip this year. At present, since the DSP products of international competitors are patented, Zhongke Haoxin adopts the RISC-V instruction set, which can better solve the intellectual property issue.

Talking about the current DSP market, Assistant General Manager & Sales Director Wang Kai said that compared with MCU, the DSP market is indeed developing relatively slowly, mainly because some international manufacturers have given up low-end businesses and strived for high-priced and high-profit markets. But for Zhongke Haoxin, the company started from scratch, and there is no slow market development, which is also more conducive to the realization of domestic substitution. At present, the shortage of chips has given Zhongke Haoxin a great opportunity, "the order volume is increasing day by day." Assistant General Manager & Sales Director Wang Kai said.

Wu Junning, co-founder and deputy general manager of Zhongke Haoxin, said that Zhongke Haoxin has optimized some instruction sets based on the RISC-V open source architecture to meet the needs of industries such as industrial control and new energy, greatly improving performance. Wu Junning, co-founder and deputy general manager of Zhongke Haoxin, revealed that compared with products such as DSP from international competitors, Zhongke Haoxin's RISC-V DSP chip can double the energy efficiency ratio of core algorithms in the field.

In addition to core processing, in terms of peripherals, Zhongke Haoxin also selected the best-performing IP on the market to achieve overall high performance.

In terms of application areas, Zhongke Haoxin currently targets markets including industrial control, power management, BMS, and visual processing. As for the development environment, Zhongke Haoxin products currently support eclipse debugging, and the user's development experience is no different from that of international competitors. In the on-site demo, Zhongke Haoxin also brought its own solution display and directly competed with the products of international competitors' DSP, with better results.