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Words? |? Han Xiao

After the rise of the wave of autonomous driving, it also brought the entrepreneurial wave of sensors, computing chips and other related technologies. After years of development, it has reached a critical period of application. Whoever can make progress in landing will really grow rapidly through the industry.

China's AI chip Unicorn Horizon is such a player. CES, which opened today? In 2020, Horizon announced the new products of the second-generation matrix autopilot computing platform, and other heavy news revolved around landing.

▲CES？ 2020 horizon booth

At the CES site, Horizon announced that it has reached a strategic cooperation with Faurecia, involving ADAS, autonomous driving, intelligent cockpit and other fields, and exhibited a series of landing achievements with more than ten partners such as Freescale, Zhongke Yan Hui and InBev Supercomputer, as well as the world's top Tier- 1 which has not been publicly disclosed. The products involved include ADAS, advanced autonomous driving, high-precision maps, multi-mode interaction in the car and so on.

The collective appearance of the domestic and international cooperative Tier 1 mass production scheme means that the mass production of Horizon's self-driving chips will be accelerated again.

▲ Horizon announced cooperation with Faurecia at the scene, with Zhang Yufeng on the left.

Zhang Yufeng, vice president of Horizon and general manager of the intelligent driving product line, told Che Xi that in terms of ADAS(L 1/L2 Autopilot), Horizon will have a good performance this year. You will get a double-digit pre-installed fixed-point project. From March this year, you will see vehicles equipped with Horizon Journey II chips coming on the market one after another.

In terms of high-level autonomous driving, there are nearly 1,000 unmanned fleets equipped with Horizon Matrix series computing platforms. By the end of 20021,Horizon will also help an autonomous driving company to realize the mass production of L4-class autonomous driving controller based on the Journey chip.

"By 2022, the shipment of Zhengtu chips will definitely reach one million." Zhang Yufeng said confidently.

Previously, Horizon was the first player in this wave of self-driving chip startups. Now, Horizon has not only maintained its leading position, but also harvested many successful fruits.

With the wave of autonomous driving technology, Horizon will really grow into a small intelligent driving giant that can break the monopoly of ADAS giant and benchmark Mobileye in the next 3-5 years, and enhance the overall strength of China in the field of in-vehicle chips.

First of all, more than a dozen partner platforms Horizon Journey chips quickly entered the ADAS market.

65438+ US time1October 7th, CES? 2020 officially opened in Las Vegas, USA, and a large number of visitors flocked to the booths of 4,500 exhibitors from all over the world. In the horizon booth of the South Pavilion, there are also a large group of media reporters and industry professionals.

The key products brought by Horizon this time include the first automotive AI chip in China-Journey II chip, monocular ADAS solution, and the second-generation autopilot computing platform Matrix? 2. At the same time, a series of heavy cooperation progress was announced.

▲CES？ 2020 horizon booth

During the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Conference at the end of August this year, Horizon announced the mass production of the first automotive ai chip in China-Zhengtu No.2 chip. The chip's equivalent computing power is 4TOPS, and its power consumption is only 2W, which meets the quality standards of the automobile industry such as AEC-Q 100, and realizes the zero breakthrough of AI chip in domestic vehicle regulations.

At this CES, Horizon exhibited several sets of ADAS solutions based on Journey II chips. The most important one is the monocular scheme, which can detect and identify nearly 100 kinds of targets in six categories, such as vehicles, pedestrians, road routes, traffic signs, license plates and traffic lights, with only one camera.

At the same time, Horizon has been specially optimized for the road conditions in China, which is convenient for Tier 1 and car companies to create various autonomous driving technologies suitable for the road conditions in China.

Zhang Yufeng, general manager of Horizon intelligent driving product line, told Chething that with its powerful performance, Horizon's ADAS scheme was quickly adopted by a series of domestic and foreign heavy Tier 1 ADAS technology suppliers, including Freetech and InBev Supercomputer. After integration with other sensors such as millimeter-wave radar, different levels of autonomous driving technology can be created.

▲ Horizon exhibited a series of mass-produced ADAS products jointly built with partners.

For example, Freetech is developing L2-level autopilot products based on this scheme, while InBev Supercomputer is building L2.9-level technology.

At present, L 1/L2 autopilot technology, namely ADAS system, is being popularized in new cars of major automobile companies.

With the blessing of Tier 1, such as Mainland China, Freetech and InBev Supercomputer, Horizon will quickly enter the front-loading market of passenger cars and grow rapidly with the popularization of autonomous driving technology.

It should be noted that the Journey II chip can not only provide computing power for ADAS technology, but also be used in intelligent cockpit systems such as driver monitoring and vehicle intelligent interaction, which further broadens its market boundary. Zhang Yufeng revealed that Horizon has obtained pre-installed fixed-point projects from several automobile companies.

"A number of new cars launched in the second half of this year will adopt Horizon's ADAS solution." Zhang Yufeng confidently said to the car, "By 2022, including the smart cockpit, the load of the second generation chip will definitely exceed one million."

Immediately after Zhang Yufeng achieved this ambitious goal, Horizon reached a strategic cooperation with Tier 1 Faurecia of the United States at CES, and * * * was equipped with ADAS, advanced autopilot and intelligent cockpit.

Second, the high-level autonomous driving business has achieved remarkable results? Nearly a thousand driverless cars have been equipped with matrix platforms.

Before in-depth communication with the car, Zhang Yufeng has been busy with CES activities for a long time-not only to meet with global Tier 1 and car enterprise partners intensively, but also to introduce his second-generation autonomous driving computing platform to the technical senior officials of major autonomous driving companies in the United States.

Zhang Yufeng told Che that Horizon's autonomous driving business mainly has two directions, one is the ADAS market mentioned above, and the other is various advanced autonomous driving fleets-both RoboTaxi and low-speed unmanned delivery vehicles.

Matrix computing platform is a sharp weapon for Horizon to enter the advanced autonomous driving market.

▲ Matrix on the horizon? 2 computing platform

The matrix of this exhibition? 2 platform, also based on Zhengtu II chip, equivalent computing power 16? TOPS, the power consumption is only two-thirds of the previous generation.

The embedded algorithm in this platform can realize 23 kinds of semantic segmentation and 5 kinds of target detection with low delay, and support multi-sensor fusion of lidar and camera.

"For L4 Autopilot Team Company, Matrix? It not only has three advantages of high computing power, low power consumption and low cost, but also can be used immediately. The embedded algorithm can stably output the perception results in extreme climate, which is very suitable for autonomous driving companies to quickly load cars and expand the fleet size. " Referring to the matrix platform, Zhang Yufeng particularly emphasized the development principle of "suit the remedy to the case".

According to Zhang Yufeng, although CES is Matrix this time? 2 platform, but more than 10 customers have started to use it, and the previous generation of matrix platform has long been famous all over the world.

"Unmanned taxis and low-speed unmanned vehicles using the matrix platform add up to nearly 1 0,000 vehicles!" When talking about the success of The Matrix, Zhang Yufeng's words clearly showed a proud tone. "Only one top self-driving company in the United States installed Matrix for more than 200 driverless cars."

On 20 19, at the end of February, 19, Audi China conducted the formation test of L4-class autonomous driving at Yanchong Expressway in the suburbs of Beijing. These self-driving Audi Q7 cars are equipped with a matrix platform on the horizon.

▲ Audi's L4 self-driving team is equipped with a horizon matrix platform.

According to the official partner chart released by Horizon, Bosch, Changan, SAIC and GAC are also its partners. It can be said that Horizon has created an ace circle of friends in the field of high-level autonomous driving, covering not only autonomous driving companies, but also car companies and top Tier 1, providing a solid guarantee for its promotion of products.

In addition to the matrix platform, Horizon also has crowdsourcing high-precision map solutions, which is also a key part of its high-level autonomous driving market.

The scheme is also based on monocular camera and Journey II chip, which has the characteristics of high acquisition accuracy, low cost and easy deployment. The scheme has been deployed in South Korea to cooperate with SK Telecom of South Korea. This year, Horizon will deploy thousands of collection vehicles by map merchants in the United Nations to help collect and update high-precision maps and provide basic support for the landing of high-grade autonomous driving technology.

Third, the three magic weapons behind the rich achievements of the horizon

This year is the fourth time Horizon has participated in CES.

On 20 17, Intel released ADAS products for the first time, and on 20 18, the domestic edge AI chip was exhibited for the first time. Won the CES Innovation Award from the Matrix platform in 20 19, and then announced a series of heavy cooperation achievements with Tier 1 and car companies in 2020. The fourth CES not only witnessed the gradual maturity of Horizon AI chip, but also witnessed its rapid advancement in commercial landing.

Then a key question is, why did Horizon win this series of important business cooperation in four years and dare to release the rhetoric of loading more than one million chips in 2022?

After more than an hour of in-depth communication with Zhang Yufeng, Che Dongxi believes that there are three main reasons, namely, high-quality products, flexible market play and excellent service system-these are the three magic weapons for Horizon to achieve rich performance.

In 20 19, Horizon cooperated with the foresight department of a top Tier 1 in Europe for a long time on L4 automatic driving, and the other party introduced Horizon to ADAS department to communicate with them about mass production before assembly.

Different from the foresight department, the mass production department of ADAS has extremely high requirements on technical maturity and stability, and the other party asked Horizon to go to Germany to demonstrate its monocular ADAS scheme.

"At that time, Horizon did not test the German part in the mass production perception algorithm." Zhang Yufeng recalled that before the test, technicians in Zhang Yufeng and Horizon actually lacked feedback to customers. "After all, it involves the quality and performance standards of pre-installed mass production."

But the result was unexpected.

The technical executives of Tier 1 told Horizon employees after a real road test, "This is the best monocular ADAS system I have ever seen."

"When we heard this sentence, we all felt a little surprised, but more of a surprise." Zhang Yufeng recalled to the car. "It was from that time that the two sides quickly reached mass production cooperation."

Zhang Yufeng didn't disclose the name of Tier 1, but in Horizon's partner list, Bosch and China, two top ADAS systems, Tier 1, are impressively listed-this is far better than listing the parameters to explain the quality level of their products.

▲ Horizon has a series of partners in the field of smart cars.

Judging from the product layout of Horizon, it has the feeling of ADAS oligarch Mobileye with global vision.

But from the perspective of market play, the horizon is much more flexible.

Mobileye's famous EyeQ series chips also have embedded sensor algorithms, but when selling products, they are often packaged in software and hardware, and will not be modified according to the customer's situation, or let the customer's algorithms run on their own sensor chips.

Horizon, on the other hand, gives a completely open gameplay-it can provide hardware or an overall solution including algorithms, and also provides customers with a complete tool chain called Tiangong Wu Kai, and customers can adjust and optimize the algorithms on the chip by themselves.

For example, SK Telecom uses the crowdsourcing high-precision map scheme provided by Horizon to collect high-precision maps, but the algorithm does not support the identification of Korean road signs. Finally, Horizon provided it with a tool chain, which enabled SK Telecom to add Korean recognition ability to the algorithm, and finally completed its deployment in South Korea.

It is this high degree of openness that enables Horizon to obtain all kinds of customers from all over the world.

In understanding the service advantages of Horizon, Zhang Yufeng mentioned a short story of hardships across the Pacific Ocean.

▲ Journey series chips and modules exhibited on the horizon.

In 20 18, a top autopilot company in the United States was trying out the matrix platform of Horizon, and some adaptation problems inevitably appeared. At that time, Horizon did not have a branch in the United States, in order to solve problems for customers in the first time.

The team of engineers from China flew to the United States almost every other week to help them solve all kinds of bugs in great detail, and finally help them realize the rapid deployment of unmanned vehicles.

"It is this kind of high-quality service across the Pacific that makes this autonomous driving company finally decide to adopt the Matrix platform." Recalling the hardships before, Zhang Yufeng's words also revealed the joy of victory. "Our customers have decided to use our platform for all new models." .

Now, although Horizon has opened an office and technical team in the United States, it no longer needs engineers from China to provide technical support to customers, but this tradition of excellent service has been preserved, which is one of the three magic weapons for Horizon to achieve success.

Conclusion: Has the battle of autopilot chip been upgraded? Horizon has won a staged victory.

With the increasing popularity of autonomous driving technology, the demand for autonomous driving chips will continue to rise in the future, causing the layout of more giants and the rise of enterprises.

NVIDIA, Qualcomm and other consumer electronics chip giants have launched a new generation of autonomous driving chips and computing platforms, respectively, Olin and Snapdragon? Ride; Denso and Toyota set up a semiconductor joint venture focusing on autonomous driving chips, Bosch built a new semiconductor factory, Huawei launched the MDC computing platform, and a number of creative enterprises emerged.

There is no doubt that the chip war in the field of smart cars will become more and more fierce and cruel-and a key factor for survival is whether mass production can land.

Judging from the news released by Horizon this time, it has made some key progress in the field of ADAS and advanced autonomous driving-more than a dozen Tier 1 have become partners of car companies, and the pre-installation projects have reached double digits.

As an emerging AI chip player since 20 15, Horizon at this stage not only maintains the leading position in AI chip creation, but also far exceeds other competitors at the same level in landing progress, and even dares to compete directly with large consumer electronics chip giants.

With the help of this wave of smart cars, Horizon will grow from a unicorn to a small car chip giant, thus enhancing the overall competitiveness of China in the field of car chips.

This article comes from car home, the author of the car manufacturer, and does not represent car home's position.