FPGA Will Contribute $2 Billion to the Future Cloud Chip Market

Chen Liguang, deputy general manager of market and Application Department of Shanghai Anlu Information Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Anlu technology"), told reporters: "FPGA has been widely used in large-scale data centers. The seven super cloud computing data centers in the world, including Amazon AWS, Microsoft azure, Alibaba cloud, Tencent cloud, baidu cloud, IBM and Facebook, have adopted FPGA acceleration servers. The wide range of application scenarios of artificial intelligence can give full play to the advantages and characteristics of FPGA and create a new application of FPGA in data centers A new situation. "

Chen Liguang stressed that cloud data center processing services are complex, diverse and flexible. FPGA's hardware field programmability and flexibility make FPGA very suitable for processing cloud data center services. He said that AI includes two important steps, training and inference At present, GPU is mainly used in the train stage to process a large number of data samples and parameters, but the demand for AI chips in the inference market is far greater than training. FPGA will play a more and more important role in the real-time neural network algorithm implementation platform using deep learning.

Cloud data centers must be built with very advanced technologies, such as 20 nm or 16 nm. Bao Chaowei, general manager of Ziguang Tongchuang marketing center, said: "At present, the most high-end FPGA product in China is pgt180h, which is a series of high-performance FPGA products of Ziguang Tongchuang Titan Series. It is a high-performance FPGA device with a scale of nearly 25 million and with 6.25gbps high-speed communication serial interface SerDes and 1066mbps high-speed storage interface DDR3. It is also the only medium and large-scale FPGA device in China. Xilinx and other foreign FPGA giants Our products are two generations higher than those in China, and their latest products can meet the application requirements of the data center. At present, the performance indicators of domestic FPGAs are still not met. However, medium and large-scale domestic FPGAs are basically sufficient in some AI terminal applications, such as automotive artificial intelligence ADAS, intelligent security monitoring, etc., and have high cost performance and certain advantages, but small-scale domestic FPGAs are still available However, it can not meet the application needs of AI terminals. Therefore, the road of domestic FPGA in the cloud and terminal market is still long and difficult, and we need to continue our efforts. "

Where is the explosion point of FPGA in the cloud data center? Bao Chaowei said that Xilinx and Altera have achieved 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 making products with higher technology (16nm). It is expected that the mass production time will be after the end of 2018, so as to realize more applications in the data center.

The progress of domestic FPGA in the data center depends on the progress of Ziguang Tongchuang, Anlu and Gaoyun "The data center is related to national security, and there are also concerns about the trade embargo. The ZTE embargo is a vivid case. As long as domestic manufacturers make it and the performance and quality meet the requirements, it is estimated that there is a great market opportunity. I believe all domestic FPGA manufacturers, including Ziguang Tongchuang, especially look forward to joining forces with well-known system equipment manufacturers in China to form a good market." Supply and demand business cooperation to achieve win-win results. "

From the perspective of the development route and law of AI chips, the key to solve several problems in the future AI chips is flexibility. To realize parallel high-speed operation, it is easy to develop, and the third is better energy consumption. These three points must be the development direction of AI chips in the future, and they are also the key points that FPGA manufacturers need to strive to break through.

From the perspective of market competition pattern, at present, the FPGA market is highly centralized. Xilinx and Altera almost account for nearly 90% of the market share, with a total of more than 6000 patents. The remaining share is occupied by lattice and MICROSEMI, with a total of more than 3000 patents. Technical patents and development difficulties have formed high barriers in the FPGA industry, which puts great pressure on the backward.

Wang Tianping, vice president of engineering of Guangdong Gaoyun Semiconductor Technology Co., Ltd., frankly said that in the traditional market of FPGA, it has been monopolized by the four major FPGA manufacturers in the United States who have operated for more than 30 years. Although domestic FPGA manufacturers are struggling, they have achieved initial results in product layout and development strategy in recent years.

"Since its establishment in January 2014, through differentiated design, Gaoyun has launched 11 chips in 2 families and 4 families in the market, with more than 50 packaging forms. It directly competes with international manufacturers for the market. It has the largest variety of products and the most comprehensive product layout among domestic FPGA manufacturers. In particular, there are only 8 chips in 2 series of low-density gw1n family embedded with flash on the chip Lattice and Altera have similar products, which are favored by customers. Our AI products have been shipped in batches in the hands of customers. Similarly, with the continuous improvement of the product layout of high cloud low, medium and high-density FPGA, our products in intelligent identification and intelligent manufacturing will soon enter the mass production stage from R & D. "Wang Tianping said.

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

"In China, Anlu technology has significant leading advantages in talent, technology, capital and market. Anlu technology has the strongest technology, market and management team in the domestic FPGA industry, and independently developed software, hardware and testing technology. The company's products and technology have been recognized by the market. At the same time, Anlu has also received many domestic leading funds in terms of capital At present, Anlu technology is developing a series of high-end FPGA products for a wide range of applications such as data centers and intelligent terminals, and strive to become a world leading FPGA company, "Chen Liguang stressed.

To sum up, the emergence of AI application requirements has brought historic development opportunities to FPGA. FPGA's strong parallel computing ability, high energy consumption ratio and flexible programming determine that it will play an important role in AI applications. From the perspective of market competition pattern, Xilinx and Intel (Altera) It will occupy a dominant position in the high-end cloud server for a long time, while the leading market of domestic manufacturers is still in the application terminal (Automotive ADAS, industry, communication, medical treatment, AR / VR) and the middle and low-end background server market. If domestic manufacturers want to enter the cloud, they must also break through the bottlenecks in FPGA high-end technical talents, advanced process and other aspects, and cooperate with China (BAT) High end cloud server equipment manufacturers work together to establish their own ecology. In the long run, it is an inevitable trend to move towards independent customization, but "the revolution has not been successful, comrades still need to work hard", and we look forward to better performance of domestic FPGA manufacturers in the future.