Breaking the US monopoly, the national team riding on the wave of Robot+ sets out

Robot +" takes flight chip industry

In order to continue to promote the sustainable and healthy development of the robot industry, at the beginning of this year, 17 departments including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology jointly issued the "Robot+" Application Action Implementation Plan, proposing the development goals of manufacturing robots in 2025 and the top ten application scenarios of robots. The release of this policy means the arrival of the "Robots+" era. Robots will be used on a wider scale, and manufacturing robots will usher in broad development opportunities.

Until now, both industrial robots and service robots are combining information technology to improve their sensing, computing, and execution capabilities. As the level of intelligence increases, robots' demand for chips is also increasing. What chips will be brought to "Robot+"?

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Without it, the robot is just an empty shell. As the "heart" of robots, current robot chips are mainly divided into four types: FPGA, MCU, DSP and IGBT.

FPGA chips can be called "programmable chips", "semi-customized chips" and "universal chips". The biggest feature of FPGA chips is that the specific functions of the chip are determined by user configuration after manufacturing is completed. When used in the field of robotics, it has the advantages of high speed, parallelism, extremely rich computing and pin resources, flexible functions, direct hardware implementation of algorithms, simple and efficient operand access mechanism, and development and debugging methods to directly explore the bottom layer of the hardware.

MCU is the first category of core main control chips for robots. Small robots value the cost and power consumption of MCUs. General-purpose robots value MCU’s precise motor control. High-end robots require MCUs to take into account both computing power and scalability.

DSP chips are used in the field of industrial robots, equivalent to playing the role of joints. With DSP control, robots can respond faster and act more accurately. Industrial robots need to process a large amount of data during work. As the application of industrial robots becomes increasingly widespread and popular, DSP chips are increasingly used in this area, and their importance, economy, and practicality will be reflected.

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But at present, most of these chips are still monopolized by foreign markets, with minimal domestic breakthroughs. The field of robotic chips is still the home field of foreign companies.

In addition to FPGA, MCU, DSP, etc., CPU is also the main chip in the field of industrial control. With the development of robots, control, grab point analysis, visual target recognition, etc. need to be implemented in more and more environments, and these all require computing power support, and just one FPGA is completely insufficient. In the field of CPU products, domestic and other brands have entered the field in recent years. Loongson Zhongke's embedded CPU products can be widely used in the field of industrial control.

The first domestic CPU stock, the domestically produced Chinese "core" that breaks the US monopoly

On June 24, 2022, Loongson Zhongke, the first domestic CPU stock, was officially listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board.

In 2001, the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences began to develop the Loongson processor. It received strong support from the Knowledge Innovation Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 863, 973, Nuclear High-Tech Foundation and other projects, and completed ten years of technology accumulation.

Loongson Zhongke was established in 2008 with the support of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Beijing Municipal Government. In 2010, Loongson Technology completed its first financing and launched market-oriented operations. In order to break the monopoly of the "Wintel" ecosystem and the "AA ecosystem" in the IT industry (Wintel refers to Intel and Microsoft, and the AA ecosystem refers to ARM and Google's parent company Alphabet), Loongson Zhongke has obtained the technology license of MIPS since 2011 , conduct research, development and production of related CPU products.

In 2020, from the perspective of complete independence, Loongson Zhongke announced that it would no longer use MIPS to develop new products, and launched LoongArch, an instruction set with full autonomy. After more than 20 years, in July last year, Loongson Zhongke developed the first fully domestic PC processor "Loongson 3A5000" based on this architecture.

Loongson actually launched its first product in 2002, named Loongson No. 1. 20 years ago, the processor of Loongson One was still very crude, with only more than 6 million transistors. At that time, the number of foreign countries could already start with tens of millions of transistors. Therefore, it seemed at the time that the performance of Loongson One was limited by a lot. Big gap.

3C5000 is a completely self-developed chip that does not contain foreign technical restrictions. It is a CPU with super computing power. Its design first focuses on the improvement of single-core performance, and on the basis of increasing the number of cores, it continuously designs and optimizes combinations to achieve the best balance.

Hu Weiwu, chairman of Loongson Zhongke, once said that the reason why he chose to develop self-developed domestic CPUs was because he felt that a big country like China cannot live without its own CPUs.

As my country's first manufacturer to create a CPU processor with completely independent property rights, it successfully developed and released a purely domestically produced CPU processor, marking a major breakthrough in my country's computer infrastructure and also signifying the advancement of my country's high-tech industry. Great achievements have been made on the road of independent research and development.

At present, Loongson processors have been used in the digital transformation of enterprises. Products such as data acquisition equipment, RTUs, industrial edge gateways, PLCs, DCS core controllers, industrial core controllers, industrial robots, and CNC machine tools based on Loongson processors have been widely used. In the fields of industrial control, energy, rail transit, water conservancy and other fields.

Born at the right time, with a mission on our shoulders

How to be independent in science and technology without being "stuck"?

In the past two years, with the strong support of national policies, my country's robot industry has begun its rise. On the long journey, the foundation of the development path is to strengthen technology, make good products, build an ecosystem, and continuously meet the intelligent transformation needs of serving users. Only when domestic enterprises truly avoid being "stuck" can they achieve technological independence.

"An industry without independent core technology is rootless." The same is true for the robot industry, core technology is the last word. According to Hu Weiwu, chairman of Loongson Zhongke, there are two layers below the CPU chip and operating system software to "get to the end". One is the shortcomings of my country's information industry, and the other is that to build an independent information technology system, an independent command system is needed. Based on foreign The information industry of the command system cannot support the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

I was born at the right time, and my mission is on my shoulders.

Semiconductor companies rely on their strong underlying chip capabilities to accelerate the innovation, upgrade and market development of robots. Chips and underlying intelligent platforms have become key links in increasing the value of robots. Domestic semiconductor companies are bringing new changes to the robot industry by building higher-performance underlying software and hardware platforms for robots.