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Technological breakthroughs, filling gaps, and achieving substitution——
From the courage to catch up to achieve breakthroughs
From gaining momentum to taking off
Nanjing, the “unicorn”.
Accelerate the realization of domestic substitution
👇
At the end of June, on the other side of the ocean, the global professional event of electronic design automation DAC2024 held in San Francisco, United States. Xinhuazhang Technology Co., Ltd., an EDA (electronic design automation) enterprise in Nanjing Jiangbei New Area, was unveiled and launched a new product, Zhaorui FusionFlex, an EDA full-process agile verification manager, which attracted keen attention in the industry.
In 2020, Xinhuazhang landed in Jiangbei New Area Research and Innovation Park, and since its establishment 5 years ago, it has focused on the field of EDA digital verification, developed and launched more than a dozen commercial-grade products in 7 series, and has been selected by more than 60 enterprises in cutting-edge fields. Recently, with a market value of US$1 billion, Xinhuazhang once again appeared on the list of world unicorns and Chinese unicorns released by well-known consulting institutions.
Latecomers should be “high-quality substitutions”
What is the focus of the industry on this new product released at the global industry conference?
This is a new EDA product, which faces the challenges of multi-tool, multi-resource, and multi-demand in today’s chip design verification process, helps integrate EDA scattered point tools, and then establishes a complete full-process domestic EDA ecosystem. Because of this, this product can greatly reduce the cost investment of downstream chip design customers in hardware, software, and process management, and shorten the application innovation cycle.
For more than 20 years, EDA has been synonymous with design modules, tools, and processes, while EDA tools have encompassed the entire process of chip design, routing, verification, and simulation. On the tens of millions of chips that perform core tasks such as smartphones, home appliances, automobiles, and industrial equipment, designers initially relied on EDA tools to design electronic systems.
The verification field that Xinhuazhang specializes in is a very critical link in EDA. According to industry estimates, chip design companies usually spend 70% of the cost of verification resources, including engineers, software, and hardware. Previously, domestic verification EDA tools had always been a blank field and were monopolized by imported products. Imported EDA tools have always occupied an absolute advantage in terms of technology maturity, market share, and application scenario ecology.
“If a latecomer wants to have market share, it must be replaced with high quality, so that customers can see the value of your difference. We choose to aim at the pain points of customer needs and make differentiated products. Xie Zhonghui, chief market strategy officer of Xinhuazhang, said that at present, due to the increasing demand for computing power and performance in the market, the complexity of the chip structure is becoming higher and higher, so the complexity and workload of the chip design verification process have also increased greatly.
Xinhuazhang has to do a “difficult but correct thing” – to fill the gap, but also to achieve new breakthroughs.
For example, compared with traditional prototyping tools, HuaPro P2E products use a high-performance dual-mode verification system, based on unified hardware and software tools, integrating prototype verification and hardware simulation dual modes, which can effectively support ultra-large hardware verification systems with hundreds of integrated chips, and can also support up to billions of gate design capacity. In other words, customers only need to spend the cost of one system to obtain the performance of two systems, reduce costs and improve efficiency.
Stand at the forefront with “cross-generational” products
For such an enterprise to be a “pioneer” and create “unique value”, R&D and innovation are its life. At the beginning of its establishment, Xinhuazhang established its own engineering technology industry research institute and set up a special team to carry out research aimed at technological breakthroughs.
In 2021, Xinhuazhang released the “EDA 2.0 White Paper”, aiming at the openness and standardization of EDA tools, automation and intelligence, platform and service, and promoting the whole process breakthrough of digital verification in the field of EDA. Nowadays, a number of products that break ecological barriers have abounded in the new product catalog of Xinhuazhang.
For example, at the DAC2024 conference, Xinhuazhang joined hands with Huada Jiutian, a leading domestic EDA company, to jointly demonstrate the latest joint solutions in the field of digital-analog hybrid simulation, which can support any hybrid simulation scenarios of digital simulation and analog Allah guidance, breaking the ecological barriers between EDA tools.
Another example is unmanned driving, which is currently attracting much attention. In order to adapt to the various complex road conditions that intelligent driving has to deal with, the chip design is extremely complex, and if it is verified by traditional EDA tools, it requires a lot of verification engineers and tool costs.
Xinhuazhang’s solution combines scenario simulation with chip simulation, and can shorten the development cycle by 18-24 months with accurate and effective verification tools and methods. In addition, its AI-assisted tools can also greatly reduce the difficulty and workload of verification.
New technological breakthroughs and new product releases also mark that after more than 4 years of accumulation, Xinhuazhang’s products are stepping into the “EDA2.0 era”.
In a customer’s 25,000+ test cases, the pass rate of Xinhuazhang’s product function test has reached 100%, and the performance is continuously improved in the run-in with a large number of application data with users.
The unique value of “cross-era” products has made Xinhuazhang emerge quickly. In the past two years, Xinhuazhang has maintained a revenue growth of about 30% every year, and more than 60 customers are from cutting-edge fields such as high-performance computing, GPU, artificial intelligence, and intelligent car driving.
Make every effort to rejuvenate the industry
Today, Xinhuazhang’s EDA tools have been fully adapted to domestic servers such as Kunpeng, Feiteng, and Loongson.
“Our downstream enterprises are chip design, and the research and innovation park where we are located is a gathering place for such enterprises.” Xie Zhonghui introduced that several leading chip design companies in the park are the downstream customers of Xinhuazhang, and even two of them work in the same building as them. “This kind of industrial ecology is very beneficial to the development of enterprises, and I hope that in the future, the park can gather more industrial chain enterprises to form a stronger agglomeration development effect.”
