Where is the explosion point of FPGA in the cloud data center?

Where is the explosion point of FPGAs in the cloud data center? Bao Chaowei said that Xilinx and Altera have already implemented the first step in the data center accelerator card. He is more optimistic about the layout of Xilinx in this field, and believes that Xilinx is also doing higher process products (16nm), and it is expected that the production time will be after the end of 2018, in order to achieve more applications in the data center.

The progress of domestic FPGAs in the data center depends on the progress of Ziguang Tongchuang, Anlu and Gaoyun. Bao Chaowei said: "The data center is related to national security, and there are also concerns about the trade embargo. The ZTE embargo incident is a living case. As long as domestic manufacturers make it, performance quality meets the requirements, it is estimated that there is a big market opportunity. I believe that all domestic FPGA manufacturers, including Ziguang Tongchuang, are particularly looking forward to working with China's well-known system equipment manufacturers to form a good supply and demand business relationship and achieve a win-win situation."

From the perspective of the development route and law of AI chips, in the future, AI chips should solve several problems. The most important thing is flexibility. It is necessary to realize parallel high-speed computing. Second, it is easy to develop. Third, the energy consumption ratio is better. These three points must be the development direction of the future AI chip, and also the key points that FPGA manufacturers need to make breakthroughs.

From the perspective of market competition, the FPGA market is highly centralized. Xilinx and Altera almost cover nearly 90% of the market. The total number of patents has reached more than 6,000. The remaining share is occupied by Lattice and Microsemi, totaling more than 3,000 patents. The difficulty of technical patents and development has created a high barrier for the FPGA industry, which is very stressful for the latecomers.

Wang Tian, ​​vice president of engineering of Guangdong Gaoyun Semiconductor Technology Co., Ltd. said that in the traditional market of FPGA, the US has been monopolized by FPGAs that have been in operation for more than 30 years. Although domestic FPGA manufacturers are struggling, they have been in product layout and development strategies in recent years. The strength has already begun to bear fruit.

“Gaoyun was established in January 2014. Through differentiated design, it has launched 2 families, 4 systems, 11 chips in the market, more than 50 packages, and directly competes with the international manufacturers for the market. It is a domestic FPGA manufacturer. Among the most widely available products, the most comprehensive product layout, especially the low-density GW1N family of on-chip Flash embedded in two series of 8 chips, only Lattice and Altera have similar products on the market, which are deeply favored by customers. Our AI The products have been shipped in batches in the hands of customers. With the continuous improvement of high-cloud low-, medium-, and high-density FPGA products, our products in intelligent identification and intelligent manufacturing will soon enter the mass production stage from R&D. Say.

Chen Liguang also said that the FPGA market is still highly centralized. In the future, the FPGA market will continue to be dominated by Xilinx and Intel (Altera). In China, it is difficult to have new FPGA companies. If there are new startups, it will be difficult to develop. This is determined by the high-tech threshold and talent card of FPGA.

“In China, Anlu Technology has a large leading edge in talent, technology, capital and market. Anlu Technology has the strongest technology, market and management team in the domestic FPGA industry, independently developed software, hardware and testing technology. Both products and technologies have been recognized by the market, and in terms of capital, Anlu has also been supported by many domestic leading funds and enterprises. Anlu Technology is currently developing high-end FPGAs for a wide range of applications such as data centers and smart terminals. Product series, strive to become the world's leading FPGA company." Chen Liguang stressed.

In summary, the emergence of artificial intelligence application requirements has brought historical development opportunities to FPGAs. The advantages of FPGA's powerful parallel computing capability, high energy consumption ratio, and flexible programming have determined that it will play an important role in artificial intelligence applications. From the perspective of market competition, Xilinx and Intel (Altera) will occupy a long-term dominant position in high-end cloud servers, while the dominant market of domestic manufacturers is still in the application terminal (automobile ADAS, industrial, communication, medical, AR/VR). And the low-end back-end server market, and domestic manufacturers must break through the bottlenecks in the high-end technical talents and advanced process technologies of FPGAs, and the high-end cloud server equipment manufacturers in the United Nations (BAT) will work together to establish a market. Your own ecology. In the long run, it is an inevitable trend to move towards self-customization. However, "the revolution has not been successful, and comrades still need to work hard." It is expected that domestic FPGA manufacturers will have better performance in the future development.