The photonic chip is commercialized, and the first product will face the data center.
Today, Xizhi Technology, a photonics computing hardware development company, announced that it has recently completed a $ 26 million Series A round of financing. This round of financing was led by Jingwei China and China Gold Capital’s Zhongjin Silicon Valley Fund. Xiangfeng Investment, Zhongke Chuangxing, China Merchants Venture Capital and other follow-up investments. Old shareholders Baidu Venture Capital and Fengrui Capital continued to increase. It is reported that Xizhi Technology expects the first commercial product to face the data center, and has also begun to cooperate with some domestic and foreign customers interested in the company’s initial system.
Unlike electronic computing, photon computing uses lasers, optical mirrors, lenses, filters and other optical components and devices, using photons as information carriers instead of electrons. It is theoretically high-speed, strong parallelism, high fault tolerance, It has the characteristics of small distortion and low heat generation, but there are also problems including single light field control means and large volume, which have never been able to achieve application. Its potential applications include: acceleration of deep learning training and reasoning, innovation of power-sensitive components and equipment, etc., “Xizhi Technology” has explored the application of photonic chips to accelerate AI computing.
“Xi Zhi Technology” was established in 2018, and Shen Yichen served as co-founder and CEO. In April 2019, Xizhi Technology officially released the first photonic chip prototype board. According to Deeptech reports, this prototype product successfully runs the convolutional neural network model that comes with Google TensorFlow to process MNIST data set. In the test, more than 95% of the operation of the entire model was processed on the photonic chip. The test results show that the accuracy of the photonic chip processing is close to that of the electronic chip (more than 97%). In addition, the time taken by the photonic chip to complete the matrix multiplication is the most Within 1/100 of advanced electronic chips. By 2020, the new algorithm developed by it to match the photonic chip has attracted customers at home and abroad such as Google, FaceBook, AWS, and BAT.
In terms of team, Xizhi Technology currently has nearly 50 employees, with teams in Boston, USA, and Shanghai, China. They all have fully functional optical laboratories. Team members include MIT, Columbia University, and Georgia Institute of Technology. , Beijing University, University of California, Berkeley and other outstanding graduates, as well as industry celebrities from Google, Microsoft, Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, ADI and other companies, the company is now focusing on expanding China’s core team.
It is reported that after Xizhi Technology received a seed round of US $ 10.7 million in 2018, it received the latest round of financing in early 2020. After two rounds of financing, the total amount reached US $ 36.7 million.