August 29, 2019 – NIO Capital-backed Black Sesame Technologies, launched their Huashan Series chip ("华山系列"芯片), which is making its global debut after three years of dedicated research. 

At the conference, Johnson Shan, Founder and CEO of Black Sesame Technologies, noted that while AI is a massive potential market for autonomous driving, companies that develop autonomous driving chips are actually very scarce. Because chips already pose daunting development difficulties (heavy investment, uncertain returns and a long development cycle), and development of chips for the automotive industry are even more of a challenge.

From day one of research and development on the Huashan No. 1 chip ("华山一号"芯片), the team worked hard designing algorithms, core IPs and system architecture. At the same time, they also worked on the toolchain, operating system and software required for the chip.

At present, Black Sesame Technologies is creating a series of vehicle safety system products built around high-performance chips to leverage their added value. This brings a variety of obvious technical advantages, for example, exclusive light control technology to help with various special environment such as rainy night reflection, foggy environment and backlighting environment.

The company's chips also boast globally leading image processing abilities, as well as intelligent perception and cognition. At less than 50ms, its end-to-end delay far exceeds the industry average of 200ms. Black Sesame Technologies' vehicle-grade system chip also boasts substantial computing power and can use structural tailoring, autonomous training and adaptive quantization to process neural networks in real-time. Methods such as structured tailoring, autonomous training, and adaptive quantization enable real-time processing of large-scale neural networks, greatly reducing power consumption while ensuring computing power.