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DPU is regarded as the third arithmetic chip after CPU and GPU, and although the track is hot, the feasibility of its implementation has been a concern. However, in Caohejing, there is a company that has been steadily promoting the realization of DPU products, which is Resnics Technology (Shanghai) Co.
The founder of Resnics , Yiren Ronnie Huang, is the founder of the company, graduated from Shanghai Jiaotong University and Michigan Technological University, and has been engaged in chip design and development in Silicon Valley since his graduation. During his 30+ years of chip career, he has owned dozens of U.S. invention patents, designed chips with total global sales volume accumulating more than 200 million, proposed the DPU architecture as early as 2011, and started the world’s first DPU project in 2012. He is also a serial entrepreneur, and all the companies he has founded have been highly successful. Thanks to the deep technical strength of the team, Resnics has become one of the fastest growing DPU startups in China and one of the earliest “dark horses” in terms of product implementation.
When interviewing Yiren Ronnie Huang, he was wearing an orange-red sweater, a blue and white striped shirt, and glasses, with enthusiasm and vigor in his gentle manner. Along with his narration, we understand the growth story of this DPU “black horse” little by little.
From Shanghai to Silicon Valley: Opening the Door to Chip Design
In 1982, Yiren Ronnie Huang entered Shanghai Jiaotong University and majored in EE automation control. He loved to study and was interested in more than just books. He won a computer programming competition in his freshman year and was able to program and write algorithms on his own in his junior year, and “could iterate any polynomial root very quickly by computerized methods.” After graduation, he traveled to the United States to pursue a master’s degree in electrical and electronic engineering at Michigan Technological University, where he independently developed a distributed simulation model in graduate school. Because he had used Wangan computers in a programming competition, he has been particularly interested in computers ever since. After graduation, he chose to work as a computer circuit design engineer in Silicon Valley.
In 1989, he joined Micronics, a Silicon Valley start-up company, to do mainframe system design. In the course of his work, he realized that it is the chip that determines the performance of a computer, and his interest began to shift to logic design, and he designed multiprocessor systems. “At that time, I mainly did logic design, not counting entering the chip industry.” Yiren Ronnie Huang recalled that in order to really enter the chip design industry, he joined Cisco Systems in 1996, where he began to come into contact with the network switching chip design, which led him to the future of the DPU road.
First to define the functionality of a DPU.
It is a rare achievement for an ordinary person to have one patent in his life, but Yiren Ronnie Huang has dozens of invention patents, why can he have so many invention patents? Perhaps, it can be glimpsed from his former experience.
Yiren Ronnie Huang grew up in the city of Shanghai. In the age of juvenile palace, he began to be enthusiastic about the production of model airplanes, ship models and radios. After reading the biography of Thomas Edison, he aspired to be an inventor like Edison, “between a scientist and an industrialist”; and in the process of studying, he was diligent in his research, “especially enjoying the joy of problem solving”; after graduation, he caught up with the After graduation, he caught the wave of technology in Silicon Valley, and his career was closely linked to the world’s scientific and technological development.
Of course, opportunities come to those who are prepared. At Cisco, the company’s culture and mechanism of emphasizing technology allowed Yiren Ronnie Huang to develop his talent to the top. Yiren Ronnie Huang recalls, “Cisco often has technical communication, we call it ‘Tech Talk’, often on Fridays, by the technical founder to talk about important technical concepts.”
Invited to High-end Forums
In 2001,Yiren Ronnie Huang joined Cisco’s internally incubated startup Andiamo, where he began to venture into the architecture space from chip design. At Cisco/Andiamo, he was awarded a total of five patents, including the invention of the Interlaken protocol that became the industry standard, replacing SPI widely used for network chip-to-chip interconnections.
After experiencing various positions at Cisco, Yiren Ronnie Huang wanted to try his hand at something new. at the end of 2007, Yiren joined SandForce, a company founded by a former colleague. “It was the first company to really take SSD controllers to the extreme.” Prior to this, compression algorithms were implemented by software, and Yiren Ronnie Huang was the first to do it inside a hardware gas pedal. This controller has been sold to Apple and Intel, and has accumulated more than 100 million units sold worldwide.
After the great success in the SSD field, SandForce was acquired, and Yiren Ronnie Huang began a new life exploration. 2011, at the invitation of Huawei’s U.S. Research Institute, he began to engage in the design of NVME SSD master chip architecture, as the main architect of the project, he designed and developed the 1812 SSD master chip architecture, which has become the leading enterprise SSD master chip in China, surpassing the Intel, Samsung indexes, and the Intel, Samsung, and Samsung indexes.
At the end of 2011, he even proposed the functional definition of DPU for smart network card. He proudly says, “I proposed ‘Advanced Computing Networks,’ which would have been the world’s first DPU project, and I proposed at that time to offload virtual machine switching from software to a network interface chip and to enable hardware offloading of multiple network protocols.”
In 2013, he chose to leave Huawei and founded CNEX Labs, a company that quickly secured strategic investments from organizations such as Dell Cisco, Microsoft, Seagate, Samsung and Micron in the US. In this company, he 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.
After several consecutive successful ventures, his investor friends have urged him to start another business. But Yiren Ronnie Huang seems to have come to a stage where he wants nothing more, and he doesn’t want to repeat the territory he has already explored. Friends also understand him, persuaded, “You can make SSD in your dream, can you go to do something else?”
Then, Yiren Ronnie Huang remembered the “Advanced Computing Network” he once proposed, which was just a concept when he proposed it in 2011, and now, with the development of artificial intelligence, the data generated puts forward a higher demand for computing power, so can we make it a wide range of landing?
In the cooperation with Microsoft, EMC, Dell, Google in the development of enterprise-class and data center-class SSD host chip, Yiren Ronnie Huang team familiar with enterprise-class and data center-class large chip requirements, recognizing the related software development and system development and testing of the entire process, the need for close cooperation with customers. And with the separation of the semiconductor industry from the U.S. and China, the demand for big chips in China has increased dramatically, and Yiren Ronnie Huang has decided to return to China to “really put big chips on the ground in Chinese customer application scenarios.”
Foundation of Resnics : To be the Broadcom of China
On July 13, 2020, Resnics was officially founded. The reason for such a name,Yiren Ronnie Huang explained, “Yi, is the benefit in my name, and Yi means benefit or more in Chinese; Si, means thinking; and Core, refers to the big chip.”
After an in-depth study of the domestic big chip industry pattern, Yiren Ronnie Huang found that in addition to his previous project 1822 intelligent network card, as well as the Ali Shenlong intelligent network card, DPU in the country is still blank. Based on the deep knowledge of DPU and Big Data Service Center, he decided to focus his products on DPU field.
More than 30 years of accumulation in the chip industry has allowed him to quickly complete the preparation of funds and talents. Most of the core members of Resnics team graduated from famous schools at home and abroad, and have many years of working experience in Cisco, Marvell, ARM China, Nokia, Broadcom, and CNEX, and have rich experience in network, switching, storage and other large chip design and verification. For team management, Yiren Ronnie Huang very much recognized Musk’s point of view, “the CEO needs to solve the problems that everyone can’t solve, and be the last one who can digest the glass, and when we encounter problems we will work as a group, and I will come together to solve the most difficult problems.”
The team grinded quickly, and delivered the technologically leading P4 programmable DPU products in accordance with customer requirements within a year. in May 2021, Resnics completed the first SMARTNIC hardware Ready; in October, it delivered the first P4 programmable OVS acceleration engine for DSAs in China; and in the beginning of 2022, Resnics DPU products in the customer’s cloud data centers passed the compatibility and performance metrics tests and met the customer’s go-live standards.
Corporate Team
Yiren Ronnie Huang said that among similar companies in China, Resnics was the first to develop and deliver its own dynamically programmable P4 engine with DSA architecture, and invented the ISA of VLIW with independent intellectual property rights to be fully dynamically programmable, which has reached the world’s leading level. “We are characterized by taking a completely autonomous and controllable development route and targeting world-class technologies and products.”
The strength of the team and the excellent performance in product delivery have made the company widely favored by capital.2021 In August 2021, Resnics completed a Pre-A round of financing, jointly led by Lenovo Venture Capital and Oakbud Capital, and followed by Reedstone Venture Capital, Tingxin Capital, Oriental Fortune and One Flag Lixin. This round of financing accelerates the development progress and landing of Resnics Technology’s products in the field of DPU chips and smart LAN cards.
Named to KPMG China’s “Core Technology” Emerging Companies 50 List
Wang Xiaobo once said, “When you are young, one of the biggest headaches is deciding what you want to do with your life.” For Yiren Ronnie Huang, he has always followed his early ambitions, and then constantly made choices on this principle, accomplishing his original dream with amazing will and impartiality. 30 years in the industry, Yiren Ronnie Huang through the industry’s great storms, from Mainframe computing transition to personal computer computing, from personal computer computing transition to network switching computing model, from the traditional hard disk to solid state drive transition. With each transition, he has been working on new and emerging technologies with the same vein of knowledge.
This is the first time he’s done this.
Compared to the abstract dream of “inventor”, he can now see the future more concretely, “Now is an era of heterogeneous computing and big data, the role of DPU will be highlighted in this era. With the landing of cloud computing data center has become a necessity, DPU will be widely used in edge computing, edge cloud. “And for the development of Resnics , he is very firm, “DPU is the entry point of Resnics in the field of big chips, we will continue to be committed to providing leading storage and network data processor chip solutions for the communication and Internet industries, to become a company with international leading technology, to lead the industry with innovation and participate in developing the We will continue to provide leading storage and network data processor chip solutions for the communication and Internet industries. We want to be the Broadcom of China.”
“The above article is from Tomson Zhang , author Tomson Zhang.”
ABOUT Us
Resnics was founded in July 2020 and is headquartered in Caohejing New Technology Development Zone, Shanghai, China. The technical team consists of core professional R&D personnel in the fields of networking, switching and storage at home and abroad, and has profound technical strength in the fields of networking, switching, storage and high-performance CPUs.
The company is committed to providing leading storage and network data processor chip solutions for the communications and Internet industries. The company aims to become a high-tech innovative company with international leading technology, leading the industry with innovation and participating in the development of industry standards.