At the recently concluded 2023 China International Semiconductor Summit attended by more than 2,000 industry professionals, both Wei Shaojun, Director of the Institute of Microelectronics at Tsinghua University, and Yang Fang, Vice President and Co-Founder of Sensetime Group, focused on developing independent and controllable technologies in their talks.
Yang detailed the development of large-scale language model (LLM) technology and its key challenges for chips, indicating that many challenges faced by LLMs mainly affect chip design and manufacturing, the coordination and standardization of software and hardware high-performance computing (HPC) clusters , sustainable development, and large-scale layout.
Yang further emphasized that Sensetime is strengthening cooperation with local Chinese AI chip manufacturers, not only promoting the establishment of industry standards, but also building a smart computing center in the Lin-gang Special Area of Shanghai.
Wei Shaojun, meanwhile, emphasized that against the backdrop of semiconductor de-globalization and fragmentation of the global supply chain, the Chinese industry must leverage its partial technological advantages to seize the initiative of development.
Wei pointed out that by solely relying on the progress of transistor miniaturization, it has become almost impossible to achieve more efficient computing. If one pursues the mainstream development trajectory of computing chips, it is difficult to meet the performance, power consumption, and cost requirements of Zettascale computing. In this context, it has become urgent to develop new computing chip architectures to cope with these new challenges, such as via software-defined chip and heterogeneous integration, to achieve autonomy of the Chinese semiconductor industry.
