Hunting for mobile communications and AIoT, Lingsheng Technology's way to survive

On May 26, 2017, Jianguang, Zhilu, Datang Telecom and Qualcomm jointly invested to establish a joint venture - Lingsheng Technology.

On May 16, 2018, Lingsheng Technology was officially registered and established with the approval of the Ministry of Commerce.

In December 2019, the first chip was taped out.

On August 28, 2020, the first AIoT SoC product was officially released.

Each and every one of these seemingly simple timelines holds extraordinary significance for Lingsheng Technology, as each and every one of these time points is the result of unremitting efforts by all its employees.

Behind the strong team, the capital and technical support from all parties of Lingsheng Technology cannot be underestimated, which also enabled it to quickly launch its first AIoT SoC product in just two years.

If chip manufacturing is likened to shipbuilding, then the subsequent market development is tantamount to setting sail in the vast ocean. The oncoming maritime risks are self-evident. For enterprises, how to successfully reach the other side in the stormy waves will become a compulsory course in the market battle.

Recently, at the "Core Vision" product launch conference, Lingsheng Technology took out a well-planned market development map, systematically demonstrating its determination and confidence to conquer the market from aspects such as product competitiveness, application areas, ecosystem, and capital support.

Using Samsung's 11nm FinFET process

Jiwei.com learned that Lingsheng Technology has released two AIoT SoC chips, namely JA310 and JA308. Among them, JA310 is its main representative and has higher performance, while JA308 is a general version, which is mainly reduced in ISP performance and encoding performance, and is aimed at 2K products.

JA310 and JA308 products

Cheng Fei, Chief Marketing Officer of Lingsheng Technology, introduced that the chip launched this time is based on the industrial manufacturing of Samsung Foundry 11nm FinFET, the world's top wafer factory, and has the leading competitive advantages of low power consumption and high energy efficiency. At the same time, based on heterogeneous processor design, the rich architecture allows software engineers to achieve better power consumption optimization at the system software implementation level.

Cheng Fei, Chief Marketing Officer of Lingsheng Technology

具体来看，JA310采用业界领先的NPU+GPU+CPU芯片协同架构，基于三星的11nm FinFET工艺制程，与目前市场上普遍采用28nm工艺的AIoT芯片相比，性能显著提升的同时功耗降低70%。

While the performance is excellent enough, in order to meet the visual application requirements of scenes such as dark light, high contrast and fast motion, JA310 also adopts a dual-channel professional-level monitoring ISP design, supporting dual-channel 2K+2K@30fps and single-channel 4K@30fps, providing strong technical support for ultra-high-definition monitoring and binocular vision. In addition, ISP is deeply integrated with AI algorithms to further improve the quality of related images.

“面对监控行业的高品质高要求，我们ISP支持的特性也是一应俱全。”成飞表示，从白平衡到3D降噪、镜头机变的矫正、宽动态等相关特性，JA310无论在暗光还是逆光情况下，效果都得到了显著提升，而支持30帧高动态也让局部细节和高速运行情况下视频效果都更加清晰。

In terms of video engine, JA310 integrates high-quality, low-latency VPU, which can perform parallel processing of 4K video encoding and decoding, and supports ultra-high compression rate H.264/H.265. It has high-fidelity, high-compression, and low-latency video processing capabilities, fully meeting the application needs of the AIoT market.

In terms of video encoding effects in the HDR field, JA310 also demonstrated its excellent performance. The following figure shows the comparison between JA310 and its competitors. The horizontal axis is the video encoding bit rate, and the vertical axis is the peak signal-to-noise ratio. The orange curve is the perfect curve, which is the part with the best video encoding effect.

Chengfei introduced that during the testing process, JA310 achieved the effect closest to the perfect curve, which is better than some friendly competitors.

In addition, JA310 integrates an independent AI hardware unit, which can provide 2Tops of hybrid computing power and support INT16/FP16 operations. Through API docking, AI algorithms under ML architectures such as ONNX, TensorFlow, and Caffe2 can be smoothly transplanted, shortening the product development cycle.

At the same time, because JA310 is based on a heterogeneous processor that integrates CPU and GPU, it can form collaborative processing with NPU to provide developers with a high-performance and highly flexible AI engine.

Inside the JA310 chip, there is also a large IP module, namely a high-performance quad-core CPU that can efficiently schedule multiple tasks, and a single core can reach 1.5GHz.

Chengfei introduced that compared with the previous generation A53 of the same level, the A55 has a 6-fold increase in single-core processing power and a 20% increase in single-core operating efficiency; the newly added subsystem configuration has significantly reduced memory latency by 50%, providing effective resource guarantees for developers and innovative sensor designs.

To sum up, the JA310 and JA308 chips released by Lingsheng Technology are based on bionic heterogeneous SoCs, integrating CPU, ISP, NPU, VPU, GPU, DPU and other modules, and have demonstrated excellent performance in power consumption, stability, image processing capabilities and other aspects.

Hunting for the mobile communications and AIoT markets

Jiwei.com learned that the JA310 chip released by Lingsheng Technology this time is mainly used in the AIoT market, including smart monitoring, face recognition, video conferencing, vehicle terminals, sports cameras and other fields. After launching the AIoT SoC chip, it will launch its next-generation product, namely mobile chips, for the mobile communications field.

Judging from the time of establishment, Lingsheng Technology started much later than other participants, but if we focus on the fields of AIoT and mobile computing, everyone's starting point seems to be not much different.

IoT has always been regarded as the third wave of development of the world's information industry after computers and the Internet. Thanks to the continuous development of AI technology and market applications in recent years, AIoT, the combination of AI and IoT, has given the Internet of Things a more intelligent advantage, making the true interconnection of all things possible.

Since 2018, not only Internet giants such as Tencent and Alibaba have begun to actively embrace AIoT, but some technology companies such as Hikvision, Dahua, Uniview and others have also begun to actively deploy in the AIoT track, and innovative companies such as Tuya Smart have also begun to participate.

The popularity of AIoT has attracted more and more companies to start making plans, and there are naturally many upstream chip companies. In the fierce market competition, how will Lingsheng Technology stand out and move forward?

In this regard, Xiao Xiaomao, CEO of Lingsheng Technology, said in an interview: "Everyone's products in the AIoT market are similar. Lingsheng can catch up as a latecomer and stand on the same starting line with its competitors. It is very important to learn from the experiences and lessons of its competitors."

Xiao Xiaomao, CEO of Lingsheng Technology

"On the one hand, the use of advanced 11nm process reduces power consumption and further reduces costs; on the other hand, adding connectivity is our biggest advantage over our competitors. Because if the connectivity is built into the module, the cost will be very high, but integrating the connectivity into the chip will greatly improve reliability, power consumption and cost."

After completing the research and development of AIoT chips, Lingsheng Technology's next major focus will be on the mobile communications field, and the AIoT chip launched this time will also lay the foundation for the next generation of products.

"Looking at the development in recent years, we can find that cloud is the general trend." Xiao Xiaomao introduced that, especially in many examples during this year's epidemic, we can see that the physical space and the digital space are connected, and this is our main direction in the future.

"The industry is also quite clear that AIoT SoC products and communication SoC products are mostly similar, and the prices are similar, but the emphasis of some capabilities is different. So we will integrate the two products into a common system based on this feature and let the two products develop in parallel."

At the conference, we saw that its AIoT SoC products have begun to be applied in the downstream market. For example, Yuanxiang Technology displayed binocular stereo vision products based on JA310, Yinguang Software's food safety solutions for schools, Anviz's smart monitoring products, Boguan's facial access control terminals, Jiangsu Lezhong's satellite Internet of Things, C-V2X intelligent networking, railway dedicated network terminals and other solutions...

Shareholders’ strong support

Since its establishment, Lingsheng Technology has received extensive attention in the industry, which is inseparable from the various capital forces behind it. According to data, Lingsheng Technology has a registered capital of 2.98 billion yuan, of which Jianguang and Zhilu hold a total of 52% of the shares, and Datang Telecom and Qualcomm hold 24% of the shares respectively.

This time, Lingsheng Technology was able to launch the AIoT SoC chip product in a relatively short period of time, thanks to the strong support of the capital. At the press conference, Jianguang and Zhilu, as shareholders, publicly talked about their investment strategy in Lingsheng Technology for the first time.

Cheng Guoxiang (left), executive vice president of Beijing Jianguang Asset Management, and Zhang Yuanjie (right), managing partner of Beijing Zhilu Capital

Jiwei.com learned that Jianguang and Zhilu mainly focus on the smart technology investment strategy - SMART to carry out investment layout. S stands for integrated circuits, M stands for new materials, R stands for advanced manufacturing, A stands for automotive electronics, and T stands for IoT.