On November 20, the EmTech China 2020 Global Emerging Technology Summit, co-sponsored by the People's Government of Xiangcheng District, Suzhou City and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Review, entered the second day's agenda. This year, EmTech China invited dozens of top scientists, academicians at home and abroad, business leaders, and science and technology elites to come to the scene to discuss the current development of emerging technologies and their tremendous impact on human society. At the meeting, Yichen Shen, co-founder and CEO of Xizhi Technology, shared a keynote speech on the acceleration of intelligent algorithms and intelligent computing by photonic chips.
Picture | MIT Technology Review
The following is a transcript of the collated speech:
Hello everyone, my name is Shen Yichen. After listening to so many speeches today, I think it is basically certain that the big data era has come. One of the two most critical elements in the big data era and the smart era is data. We definitely need more and more massive data to help us train smarter models. The second and equally important element of
is the data processing hardware, that is, the chip. In the future, there will be more and more terminals for application data and data collection. In the next ten years, the amount of data will continue to grow exponentially.
On the other hand, a lot of things have happened to the hardware that processes data in the past ten years. If you compare computers in 2020 with computers in 2010, you may find that computers in 2010 can still run the current software. But if you use a 2000 computer to run the 2010 software, I can guarantee that 99% of the software will not run.
This shows that the development of electronic chips and computing power in computers has gradually become slower and slower, due to physical limitations. With step-by-step iterations, the computing power dividend brought by each iteration has gradually decreased. From 16 nanometers to 7 nanometers, and then from 7 nanometers to 5 nanometers, many people may only see an increase of 10% to 20%. But in the next step, the growth will only get smaller and smaller.
In the next 10 years, using increasingly slower-growing electronic chips to match an ever-increasing data demand may be the biggest challenge in this field at present. The entire electronic chip industry of realized this problem very early, so it is constantly trying to make higher-performance electronic chips to meet data requirements.
takes the most used flagship product on the market as an example. One of them is the 2015 NVIDIA GPU chip. The entire chip is about 600 square millimeters in area, and the energy consumption is about 100W. In addition, the NVIDIA deep neural network training and inference chip A100, which was just launched in 2020, has an area of about 800 square millimeters. This is not to say that he just wants to make it so big, he can actually make it bigger.
But 826 square millimeters is the maximum limit of the chip that can be etched by the lithography machine now, which is the limit of the size of a single chip. At the same time, in order to put more storage and computing on one board, the existing product puts 7 electronic chips in a large package at the same time for joint computing, so that its energy consumption can reach 450W. In another case of
, in 2019, an American start-up company launched a computing chip with an area of about 46225 square millimeters. The chip is as big as your laptop. Its energy consumption is 20000W, and the energy consumption of 5 induction cookers or The heat generated is about the same. Of course, this does not mean that chips will grow like this in the future, but at least to some extent, it can represent the needs of the entire electronics industry for high-performance computing power and its big development direction. In general, it is slowly approaching the physical limit. .
I often compare chip design to urban development or urban planning. Nowadays, chips are getting bigger and bigger. Everyone think about the cities 500 years ago. It is very difficult to turn a city of 1 million years ago into a city with a population of 10 million, because it will be limited by several infrastructure issues, one is the inter-city Transportation, if you use traditional horse-drawn carriages, walking or even cars, if all roads are flat, there is no way to meet the transportation and supply needs.
In addition, if each building is a two-story building 500 years ago, it will be very difficult to support a larger urban system.
What is most needed? mostWhat is needed is a technology that can help traditional electronic chips to upgrade the next generation from the foundation, and optical computing and photonic chips are the most suitable choices for the next generation of computing chip infrastructure technologies.
First of all, light can effectively replace electricity to solve high throughput and traffic problems. Z9z optical fiber communication has been used for decades, and the energy consumption, delay and flux of light in transmitting signals are far better than electrons. In addition, in a single calculation, using light to do calculations does not require a lot of logic gate reasoning. It itself is a completely passive process, so it can greatly save energy consumption at the calculation level. The
optical chip is a relatively unfamiliar concept to the general public. When it comes to light, people may think of very large systems such as cameras and lenses. Integrated photonics technology is a technology that has developed vigorously in the past 10 years. The main concept is to manufacture very tiny micron-level optical devices on silicon machines that produce electronic chips, so that thousands of photonic components can be integrated on a chip, and Let electronic components be used together very well. Related technologies of
are slowly approaching maturity, and Xizhi Technology has successfully launched the world's first photonic computing chip prototype board in 2019. The company currently plans to tape out product-level photonic computing chips. A single chip integrates 3,000 photonic components, which is 100 times more than the previous optical communication photonic chips, and this is already a technology accepted by the existing manufacturing process and industry chain.
Xizhi Technology's technological innovation is mainly to use optical chips to accelerate 2/3 of the calculation elements. Any computing system has three main elements of calculation: the first part of is data processing. We use light instead of electric chips to do most of the data processing, that is, big data linear calculation; the second part is data transmission, which includes data on a chip. Transmission, data transmission between chips. Imagine the common inter-city high-speed rail system, highway system, and elevated system in cities. Only with inter-city and inter-city high-speed systems can the city be bigger and have surrounding satellite cities.
Xizhi Technology currently does not do is the third element, the storage system. We feel that the storage system is still the core part of the entire computing system, so our product is a combination of light and electricity. The computing technology of
is derived from the research results of four years from 2013 to 2017 during my study at MIT, and I also published papers at that time. The concept of
is to convert traditional electronic signals into optical signals, let the optical signals pass through the photonic chip, and control the interference between these lights. When these lights interfere with each other and when these numbers are calculated, the entire calculation time is the light passing through. Chip time-between 0.1 nanosecond and 0.5 nanosecond. This time is 1% of the current electronic chip to do the same large matrix multiplication, which has a very big improvement in speed and delay.
In addition, we also do high-speed interconnection between photonic chips, and using light for data transmission is a very reasonable solution. and we have technically realized data transmission at the same distance, which can save 10 times the energy consumption compared to electric chips, which can more lubricate chip calculations.
Xizhi Technology’s main technical solution is to achieve very high integration in light calculation and light transmission, and let the photonic chip assist the existing digital electronic chip, thereby speeding up the overall calculation process.
On Xizhi Technology’s chip, the photonic network and the computing unit of the photonic network will transmit and interact with data on the entire chip at the speed of light. In addition, one or more digital electronic chips will be superimposed on the optical chip, so that storage and simple logic operations and nonlinear operations will continue to be performed on the electronic chip. Of course, we will also have several optical chips to provide the light source for the entire photonic chip. The
is finally packaged, which may be similar to the chip on the current board, but compared to other similar digital chips, the digital computing power can be increased by 5 times or even 10 times.
With the above vision, we are very quick to invest in the commercialization of optical computing. We are also the fastest optical computing company in the world. The company was established in 2017 and is now in its fourth year. From an Internet perspective, it is already an older company. But from the perspective of the chip industry, we are still a relatively early stage company.
In 2019, Xizhi Technology completed the first complete board system and verified the neural network algorithm. right now I amWe completed the second round of financing with a total of more than 70 million US dollars. Our first product should be launched next year.
At the same time, we have more than 100 engineers and researchers, mainly in the United States and China, of which more than ten employees are scientists and engineers from MIT, and 70% of chip designers have more than ten years of industry experience. To do such a thing that uses new technology to promote old products requires an innovative young team and an experienced digital chip design team to do it together. We have also reached the scale of the first product in the team size.
In the past few years, we have mainly done two things. One is to make the integration of optical chips larger and larger. Xizhi Technology has changed the matrix from the earliest 4×4 to a matrix size close to 100×100, and The optical and electrical chips are very tightly integrated, so that the electrical chip can be stacked on the optical chip to perform the operation of the entire system.
You can think of Xizhi Technology’s technology as a next-generation chip company with high computing power and low energy consumption. This chip can be widely used in data centers and can do artificial intelligence or big data-related machine learning operations. The scenarios include autonomous driving, the Internet, smart cities, finance and other aspects. At the same time, a more complete software stack architecture will be made to help customers not feel that they are doing it only when they use the chip. That is, the entire contact points and bonding points of the optical chip and the electric chip are similar to the existing digital chip.
In the field of public services, Xizhi Technology also has a lot of entry points. It is currently launching a series of big data application scenarios such as smart transportation, smart ports, and smart security in several first-tier cities.
In addition to AI, the application scenarios of photonic chips are not only in machine learning. In the future, many scientific researches including the research and development of the atmosphere, geography, new materials and drugs can improve the current research and development progress through the use of higher computing power optoelectronic hybrid chips. We also recently published a paper on Nature on how to use photonic chips for drug development.
Xizhi Technology is also fortunate to have successful business cooperation with some of the world’s leading companies. The photonic chip represents a technological direction that can be industrialized faster. One of the main reasons is that the photonic chip does not rely on the process in particular, and the technology is not limit. Therefore, we can use 28-nanometer electronic chips to make the effect of 7-nanometer electronic chips faster, which is why Xizhi Technology has recently received the attention of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and is implementing some very important projects.
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