On October 16, 2018, Xilinx, the global FPGA chip giant, held the Xilinx Developer Conference in Beijing. The Global president and CEO of Xilinx, Victor Peng, delivered a keynote speech entitled "A platform for flexible and intelligent world." As the Certificate Member of Xilinx in the field of smart car electronics in China, Autocruis was invited to participate in and the company co-founder and CEO Dr. Guan Yanfeng and CTO Dr. Jing Shen attended the conference together. At the conference, Dr. Jing Shen gave a keynote speech on "Design and Development of FPGA-Based Computer Vision Systems" . During the period, Victor Peng and Dr. Guan Yanfeng conducted in-depth exchanges on topics such as “AI Development Trends and FPGA Application Trends” and took a group photo.
President and CEO of Xilinx Victor Peng delivered a keynote speech
Xilinx CEO Victor Peng first introduced the company's three strategies of “data center priority, accelerating mainstream market growth and driving flexible computing”. He said that based on FPGAs, SoCs and MPSoCs, Xilinx introduced the industry's first Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform (ACAP) VersalTM. ACAP was developed by over a thousand engineers of the company for 4 years , which invested more than $1 billion. It integrates a scalar processing engine, adaptive hardware engine and intelligent engine, as well as cutting-edge memory and interface technologies to provide powerful, adaptive heterogeneous computing acceleration for a wide range of applications during the rapid development of AI and dense edge computing. At the same time, ACAP has a range of tools, software, libraries, IP, middleware and frameworks that conform to industry-standard design processes.
Dr. Guan Yanfeng and Victor Peng have an in-depth exchange and take a group photo
Based on TSMC's 7 nm FinFET process technology, the Versal portfolio is the first platform to combine software programmability with hardware acceleration and flexibility in a specific area. It includes six product portfolios: Prime, Premium, HBM, AI Core, AI Edge, and AI RF. They use groundbreaking AI engine technology to meet the new demands of low-latency AI inference for a variety of applications, and support applications such as wireless and radar.
Victor Peng said that Xilinx has been in the automotive market for more than a decade. The Zynq-7000 series devices are widely used in Tier1, such as BOSCH. As of 2018, there are already 29 brands and 110 models using Xilinx chips and solutions, and the cumulative chip sales exceeded 40 million.In the booming field of smart car electronics, in addition to the Zynq series, Xilinx has accumulated a rich product portfolio including MPSoC series and AI Edge series, which are widely used in smart cars such as Car networking, ADAS, and autonomous driving. In July of this year, Xilinx entered into a strategic partnership with Daimler to develop AI -based in-vehicle systems and applications for Mercedes-Benz driverless cars.
The future of the smart car market is an extremely large market, and Xilinx will invest more in the smart car field to provide more powerful and flexible platforms and tools for developers and innovators in the hardware and software industry,” concludes Victor Peng. “We are very much looking forward to the excellent smart car high-tech companies like Autocruis and automakers going hand in hand to create a world of flexibility and intelligence in the future !”
隨后，關艷峰博士首先對Xilinx發布業內首款自適應計算加速平臺Versal和新一代加速器卡Alveo表示祝賀，感謝Xilinx一直以來對自行科技的支持和幫助。
他表示，隨著全社會出行安全、出行效率以及舒適性需求的提升，汽車智能化正逐漸成為汽車產業創新升級的核心驅動力，智能化問題已經成為世界各國爭奪未來汽車行業全球話語權和標準制定權的焦點問題，各國紛紛制定和出臺相關法規標準。在中國，自行科技也在積極參與，與此同時致力于提供可大規模量產的，前裝車規級的汽車智能化產品和服務。
智能汽車需要實時可靠地感知車、人、道路以及基礎設施所傳遞的各類信息和信號，為ADAS和自動駕駛提供決策和執行支持，根據具體功能和ADAS階段的不同，涉及的計算量從幾TOPS到幾百TOPS不等，而且OEM不斷升級變化的需求也對供應商和開發者能夠迅速迭代提出了新的要求。自行科技結合多年在FPGA平臺開發優化CNN技術的經驗，構建出完善的設計、開發、驗證和量產測試工具鏈，形成了成熟的訓練平臺、仿真平臺以及產品開發平臺。其中，就深度神經網絡而言，自行科技為了適配各類神經網絡的快速優化和產品開發，獨立開發了基于FPGA平臺的神經網絡狀態機，大大加速產品開發進程，更新迭代一個新網絡的周期可以在1個月完成。
在交流中，關艷峰表示，Level 4+ 級無人駕駛是汽車智能化的重要訴求，但無人駕駛之路非常漫長，這需要汽車、半導體和通信等傳統產業的持續發展以及深度融合，更需要新型傳感器、新型處理器和AI等新產業發展以及成熟。自行科技將在視覺感知、多傳感器融合感知、駕駛員狀態感知、車輛主動安全以及車載AI軟硬件平臺等方面貢獻自己的力量。
公司目前基于CNN網絡技術開發出業內最具性價比的FPGA加速方案。以普遍應用的VGG-16為例，如果不經過深度優化即使在MPSoC-ZU9中進行前向推理計算時，幀率只能達到19.3fps，但是自行科技通過權值壓縮、并行化加速設計和算法優化后，可以在zynq 7020中實現超過30fps的幀率，同時性能不損失，這得益于自行科技在混合型精度的神經網絡與FPGA深度結合方面的努力和積累。
關艷峰還強調，自行科技非常看好FPGA在ADAS和自動駕駛領域的未來發展和應用。公司從創立伊始，就專注在智能汽車電子領域，開發出基于FPGA的前向ADAS系統、駕駛員監控（DMS）系統、智能全景影像系統，多傳感器融合等產品，逐漸形成了車內車外聯合感知決策，遠距感知與近距離感知聯合協同的技術和產品路徑，是少數掌握ADAS與自動駕駛核心算法并實現產品量產的企業。憑借產品高性能、高可靠性、低功耗以及在產品安全性上的突出優勢,自行科技獲得了國內眾多傳統車廠(乘用車與商用車)、新能源和互聯網造車公司和Tier1汽車零部件供應商的高度認可。
最后，Victor Peng與關艷峰博士就下一階段的合作進行了深入溝通，并達成共識，雙方將繼續深化合作關系，加強溝通交流，攜手同行，共創共贏！