By Han Meimei

The CES stage in Las Vegas, USA, has witnessed too much growth.

For Edge Artificial Intelligence Chip Enterprise Horizon, every CES stage in four years has been a solid imprint.

At the beginning of 2017, when CES was on, horizon didn't even have its own booth, but appeared as an embedded ADAS system provider of Intel FPGA hardware platform.

A year later, Horizon had a stand-alone booth and brought in the main autopilot market

Based on chips, horizon has found a breakthrough point from technology transition to products. On CES in 2019, matrix, the automatic driving computing platform brought by horizon, and multiple automatic driving solutions based on matrix (including matrix visual perception solution, navinet crowdsourcing high-precision map acquisition and positioning solution, lidar perception solution) are the best proof.

If horizon is still exploring the business space that a chip company can empower the industry in the first three years, then horizon on CES in 2020 has obviously found and firmly established its own commercialization path. When its technology is developing in a deeper direction, it is also creating its own industrial chain ecology.

During the CES 2020 exhibition, Horizon not only showcased China's first car gauge-grade AI chip

In addition, in the center of horizon's booth this year, horizon's joint partners exhibited a number of cooperative landing products and programs, such as ADAS, automatic driving, crowdsourcing high-precision map, and in car multi-mode interaction, which are enabled by the second generation of journey.

Horizon displays the auxiliary driving and automatic driving products cooperated with some international and domestic customers

With the development of chips from scratch, product solutions from one to many, and product strength, CES has witnessed the rise of the horizon. Horizon has also taken a solid commercial road on the artificial intelligence track in its own way.

AI chip of vehicle specification level fills the gap in China

The automotive electronic chip industry is a potential market.

A figure shows that the demand scale of automotive electronic chip industry will reach about 50 billion yuan by 2021. In 2020, the number of vehicles using the Internet of vehicles will increase from 60 million to 250 million, and by 2035, the number of driverless vehicles will reach 21 million.

However, as the world's largest automobile market, China has been monopolized by a few large international manufacturers in the field of automobile chips for many years. With the booming of automatic driving industry, the emerging domestic AI chip companies have been expecting to make breakthroughs in this field.

However, the automotive industry has strict requirements for chips at the vehicle specification level. The AI chip of vehicle specification level needs to meet aec-q100, which is a vehicle electronic reliability standard. It needs to go through rigorous R & D, manufacturing, packaging, testing and certification processes. The product development cycle is long and difficult. The difficulty is far beyond the comparison of consumer electronics chips and industrial chips.

Therefore, most of the domestic start-ups involved in automatic driving mostly use foreign vehicle specification level chips and their own algorithms to provide ADAS and automatic driving solutions in different scenarios. But in the lower level chip, it is subject to foreign chip manufacturers.

In August 2019, Horizon officially launched the second generation of China's first vehicle-level AI chip journey. The chip is understood to have achieved streaming and small-scale production since its launch in August. The gauge-grade AI chip

According to CES horizon, the first mass-produced model to carry the AI chips and solutions of Zhengcheng second generation vehicle will be launched as early as 2020. It is expected that horizon will launch a new generation of vehicle specification level AI chips in succession this year to provide more power for the landing development of automatic driving.

Out of the country, show domestic strength

The second generation of journey 2 chose to exhibit at CES 2020, which is also an opportunity for horizon to show its strength.

This chip integrates the second generation BPU architecture of horizon (Bernoulli Architecture), which can provide 4 tops of equivalent computing power, typical power consumption of 2 watts, and can efficiently and flexibly achieve multi class AI task processing, real-time detection and accurate recognition of multi class targets.

Journey II chip

With this AI chip that has been streamed, horizon can realize many industry empowerment, including automatic driving visual perception, crowdsourcing high-precision map and positioning, visual ADAS and intelligent human-computer interaction and other intelligent driving scenes.

For example, the global market-oriented single vision ADAS solution based on the second generation of journey is a typical case.

Thanks to the performance of the second generation of journey, horizon's single eye forward-looking ADAS scheme can effectively detect and recognize nearly 100 kinds of targets in six categories, including vehicles, pedestrians, road lines, traffic signs, license plates, traffic lights and so on, within a delay of 100 milliseconds.

For the pain points of ADAS industry, the current ADAS solution is specially optimized for Chinese roads and scenes. This is expected to become an ice breaking force for domestic ADAS manufacturers to enter the domestic mainstream automobile supply chain.

Horizon matrix 2

At CES 2020, matrix 2 version was launched on the horizon automatic driving computing platform based on the AI chip of the second generation of vehicle specification level.

Compared with Matrix 1 released in 2018, Matrix 2 has an equivalent computational force of 16TOPS in terms of performance, while its power consumption is only 2/3 of the original. At the sensing level, Matrix2 can support multisensor sensing and fusion including cameras, lidar, etc., and achieve up to 23 classes of semantic segmentation and five categories of target detection with low latency.

Horizon's perception algorithm implemented on matrix 2 can cope with complex environment, and can output stable perception results even in special scenes or extreme weather conditions.

Horizon said Matrix2 can meet the perceived computing needs of multiple countries, high-level self-driving fleets in different scenarios, and unmanned low-speed cars.

With the launch of matrix 2, the scale of horizon's commercialization in the direction of autonomous driving is expected to grow further.

in addition to the combination of hardware and software, providing a complete solution with high performance and low power consumption, horizon also takes into account the needs of customer self-development and customization. In terms of programme delivery, the horizon has not been adopted consistently by international suppliers

Customers can use a complete set of ADAS solution reference design, or use the AI tool chain provided by horizon, openexplorer, to develop completely independent software algorithms.

It is understood that horizon open Explorer contains a full set of tools for AI algorithm and application development for actual scenes. Model training tools, inspection and verification tools, compilers, simulators, embedded development packages, etc. In addition, there are reference model samples and reference overall software solutions in the tool chain to support customers' rapid product landing.

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Rooted for four years, horizon friend circle is becoming more and more ecological

The past four years have been the four years of horizon deep grinding technology, as well as the four years for it to take root in the industry and establish ecology.

Prior to the accumulation of technology, in 2019 converted to a commercial outbreak. With Car Regulation Grade 2019

It is understood that horizon has launched multi-dimensional cooperation with many top tier 1s in ADAS, automatic driving, multi-mode interaction and other fields, and its intelligent driving business orders up to hundreds of millions of yuan in the year.

From left to right are: Zhang Yufeng, vice president of horizon and general manager of smart driving product line, and co-founder of horizon

On the first day of CES 2020, horizon also announced its strategic cooperation with the world's leading auto parts technology company, Faurecia. The scope of cooperation between the two sides covers many fields such as advanced assisted driving and intelligent cockpit.

In addition, on the list of horizon circle of friends, there are Tier1, such as freitech, InBev supercomputing, Zhongke Huiyan, Continental, etc.; automatic driving companies, such as leader, Zhizhe, etc.; map players, such as SKT, deepmap, etc.; laser radar players, such as hexai technology, Suteng juchuang, etc.

Horizon intelligent driving partner

Horizon said: as more projects are gradually implemented, it is expected that the fixed-point projects will reach double digits by 2020, and the annual shipment volume of journey series chips will reach million level in 2022.

In general, AI chips are the underlying technology in autopilot, where players compete for stamina and creativity. By virtue of

Under the screening mechanism of market and capital, the competition in the industry will be more intense. How to keep the technological innovation and commercial exploration of horizon will be the key factor for it to grow into the backbone of domestic automatic driving.