The following article comes from the new Upper School at PTU
Since returning to China 2 years ago, Huang Yiren, the founder of Resnics Technology, has found that more and more Chinese who previously worked in the chip field in Silicon Valley have come back, and those who can’t get an appointment in Silicon Valley can get one in Shanghai.
“I am from Shanghai”, this “chip veteran” who graduated from Shanghai Jiaotong University in 1986, has been working and living in the US for 32 years, and decided to go back to China to start his own business to set up Resnics Technology 2 years ago, and fighting in his hometown “home field” makes him feel very friendly.
Yiren Ronnie Huang, Founder of Resnics Technology
Prior to meeting with Jiao Tong University’s New Upper School, Resnics Technology just announced the completion of its Series A funding round of several hundred million RMB. This round of financing was led by Jen Chen Semiconductor, the IC project investment platform of CITIC Capital, and its co-investor MassAve Global, member company of JLSemi Semiconductor.
“Dr. Runsheng He, the founder of JLSemi, also graduated from Shanghai Jiaotong University, said, “Although he and Dr. He are alumni, they met in the United States, and at that time, Dr. He was still starting his business in Credo, but now he has restarted the cooperation because the two of them have returned to China to start their own business, which is the change of the industry and the situation of the life.
In the big chip circle, there is a common saying in the industry that financing hundreds of millions of dollars is just a “start”. The big chip is a “money-burning” job that only people who have worked in big companies can do. With Cisco, SandForce, Broadcom, Huawei’s U.S. Research Institute, CNEX Labs work experience, in 2011 the world’s first DPU architecture Huang Yiren, is obviously that “spent big money, and earned big money people. It is understood that Huang has dozens of U.S. patents for inventions, and has designed chips with a cumulative total of more than 200 million units sold worldwide, and he is also a serial entrepreneur who has been involved in startups that have been very successful.
In the field of DPU technology development, I started ten years ago. Speaking of his specialty, Huang Yiren is not modest. He feels that China now, like Silicon Valley in the 90s, is the best time for chip startups. And this batch of “chip veterans” like Huang Yiren went back to China to start their own business, the gap between China and the United States has been greatly shortened from the perspective of chip architecture, but in the realization of chip specifications, there is still a certain gap.
Golden Age of Big Chips
The field of “DPU”, in which Huang Yiren is rooted, is known as the “highway” of data, and is considered to be a market of hundreds of billions of dollars, which is favored by many capitals. It is predicted that by 2025, the market volume in China alone will reach a scale of $4 billion.
Currently, there are thousands of chip design companies in China, but most of them are doing small application chips, including WiFi chips, power chips, Bluetooth chips, etc., and the players doing big computing chips are relatively rare.
As China undertakes the third global transfer of semiconductor industry, the industrial structure is also transforming from “large packaging and testing – medium manufacturing – small design” to “large design – medium packaging and testing – medium manufacturing”, which means that it is moving from the low-end to the high-end, and from small chips to large chips.
In the field of big chips, CPU, GPU and DPU are judged as the three pillars of the future data center market. As the name suggests, DPU (Data Processing Unit) is a dedicated data-centric processor.
In the “three cores” route, the role of Jiao Tong University people is no less important. CPU, the co-founder of this core technology Chu Yanzhou graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering, Shanghai Jiaotong University, majoring in microelectronic circuits and systems; in the GPU, the wall of the refrences of the technology of the Liang Xiaojie/Xu Lingjie, the co-founder of the Muxi and the CTO of the Peng Li all graduated from the Jiao Tong University; and in the DPU, the beneficial Resnics technology and the core of Qiyuan.
Huang Yiren feels that we are in an era of data explosion: data is growing explosively, and the logic of data processing is changing from “computation-centric” to “data-centric”, and DPUs are about to usher in an era of great development.
As early as 2011, Huang Yiren designed and developed the 1812 SSD host controller chip architecture at Huawei’s U.S. research institute, becoming the leading enterprise SSD host controller chip and surpassing Intel and Samsung’s targets.
At the end of 2011, he was the first in the world to propose the functional definition of “DPU”. At that time, I put forward the concept of “Advanced Computing Network” to combine computing power, computation and network, which is a more accurate name than DPU,” said Mr. Huang.
In 2013, Huang Yiren left Huawei and founded CNEX Labs, a company that quickly gained strategic investments from Dell, Cisco, Microsoft, Seagate, Samsung and Micron. He even led the team to make the world’s first Open Channel SSD controller, won the patent for NVMoE invention, and made the first SSD master chip with native Ethernet port in 2015.
And by 2020, Yiren Huang started to look for his next entrepreneurial direction. Although many people advised him to go back to China to make SSDs (Solid State Drives), he didn’t want to just do what he had done over and over again, and his friends understood him and advised, “You can make SSDs in your dreams, can you go do something else? “The
DCP industry chain mapping, data source Head Panther, Wind
Then, Huang Yiren remembered the “Advanced Computing Network” he once proposed, which is a very challenging goal, but precisely because of the challenge, “Doesn’t the big chip smell good?”
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The decoupling of China and the United States has brought challenges to semiconductors, but it has also brought great opportunities. Huang Yiren feels that the “charge horn” of domestic substitution has already been blown, and in the background of such a big potential, the big chip will give birth to great entrepreneurial opportunities, and he will usher in his own “golden age”, “Resnics Technology wants to be China’s Broadcom (Broadcom)”.
Powering the New Journey of “East Counts, West Counts”
Unlike many people at that time, Huang Yiren’s life goal from childhood was not to be a scientist, but an inventor + industrialist. Since he was a young boy, he has been passionate about model airplane, boat and radio production, and his study experience in Shanghai Jiaotong University gave him a lot of room for growth. He loves to study, and spent a lot of time on algorithms in the university, “At that time, the disk on the computer was still 8 inches,” recalled Huang Yiren, who froze the “roots of the characteristic polynomials through the computer algorithms iterated out”.
After graduating from Jiaotong University, he went to Michigan Technological University in the United States to pursue a master’s degree in electrical and electronic engineering, and independently developed a set of distributed IC latency simulation models in graduate school, and after graduation, he chose to work as a computer circuit design engineer in Silicon Valley.
While it is a rare achievement for an ordinary person to have a patent in his lifetime, Yiren Huang has dozens of invention patents. And it is because of these patents and knowledge reserves that Yiren Huang could say without any modesty when he started his business in DPU: “From the architecture point of view, we don’t lose to the big companies in the United States.
In the U.S., Yiren Huang has successfully participated in the founding of several chip companies, and at that time, he gained the business experience of “not necessarily looking for the biggest customers, but the most suitable customers”. For example, Microsoft and Amazon may be the largest customers in the industry, but they are very price sensitive and may not be the best customers.
In the field of DPU, with the booming development of China’s cloud computing industry in recent years, cloud computing has been applied in all walks of life, and it has become a general trend for enterprises to go to the cloud comprehensively. The implementation of the national strategy of “East Meets West” promotes the reasonable layout of data centers, optimizes supply and demand, greentextension and interconnectivity.
The implementation of national strategies such as “East Counts West Counts” has brought good opportunities for the development of IceChip Technology. He feels that the new cloud vendors that have emerged in the country have brought great opportunities for domestic enterprises such as IceChip Technology.
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The domestic cloud computing market is very large,” said Huang Yiren, continuing the development of “to improve independent development capabilities and the overall level of technology,” and other development ideas, Resnics Technology to do is “no time to wait,” to accelerate the pace of research and development. This time, Resnics Technology accepts the investment from Renchen Semiconductor, the IC project investment platform of CITIC Capital, and so on, and the reason behind is to embrace the national strategy of “East Counts, West Counts”.
It is because of the consideration of “no time to wait” that Resnics Technology has been developing very fast in the past 2 years since its establishment.
In May, 2021, IceSmart launched its newest product, the “IceSmart”.
In May 2021, Resnics Technology completed the first SmartNIC hardware Ready;
In October 2021, delivered the first P4 programmable OVS acceleration engine for DSA in China;
In early 2022, Resnics DPU products passed compatibility and performance index tests in the customer’s cloud data center and met the customer’s go-live standard.
In April 2022, launched China’s first commercially available, P4 programmable cloud-native smart NIC with independent intellectual property rights, featuring high performance, low latency, high flexibility, and low power consumption, making it the best choice for accelerating network applications such as OVS, NFV, SDN vRouter, 5G UPF, and more.
P4 Programmable Cloud Native Smart NIC from Resnics Technology
Huang Yiren revealed that the P4 programmable cloud-native smart card launched by Resnics Technology is the first of its kind in China to develop and deliver its own dynamically programmable P4 engine with DSA architecture, which has reached the world’s leading level.
“In the future, Resnics Technology will empower the domestic intelligent NIC solution to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the system while improving the system efficiency, reducing the cost and increasing the efficiency for the cloud platform,” said Huang Yiren, “The product has already been put into use in one of the state-funded clouds.
Finally, Huang Yiren disclosed to “Jiaotong University’s New College” that Resnics Technology is expected to start the next round of financing in the second half of this year.
About Us
Resnics was founded in July 2020 and is headquartered in Caohejing New Technology Development Zone, Shanghai, China. The team consists of core professionals in the fields of networking, switching, and storage at home and abroad, with deep technical expertise in networking, switching, storage, and high-performance CPUs.
The company is committed to providing leading storage and network chip solutions for the communications and Internet industries, aiming to become a high-tech innovative company with international competitiveness, leading the industry with innovation and participating in the development of industry standards.