Cambricon Singgo Announces Employee Layoffs Amid Restructuring

Recently, there have been media experiences about layoffs within the Cambricon Singgo staff. The information states that “about half of the software department has been laid off, while only a few employees in the hardware department will handle post-layoff matters. Additionally, new projects have been suspended and may be abandoned in the future.”

In response to this information, the layoffs primarily goal the Singgo groups in Nanjing and Shenzhen. The layoffs at Cambricon are primarily pushed by monetary issues, aiming to shortly stabilize their funds. In phrases of personnel, Sun Xiaoyun, the pinnacle of the Singgo staff’s construction, has already resigned final 12 months.

The Singgo staff has undergone a large-scale downsizing. The focus of trade consideration is how the event progress of Singgo’s clever driving chip goes.

In March 2022, Wang Ping, the CEO of Cambricon Singgo, introduced that “In the next two years, there will be two heavyweight chips officially released. One is the SD5226 series product targeting L4, which supports on-vehicle training. The other is the SD5223 chip for the L2+ market.”

According to the plan, the SD5226 sequence chips focusing on the L4 market would be the first to supply a single-chip SOC-based L4 autonomous driving answer. The computing energy can be additional elevated to 400 TOPS, with a most CPU computing energy exceeding 300KDMIPS, and it’ll undertake a 7nm course of with an unbiased security island design.

However, on account of sanctions, the event progress of the Singgo L4 clever driving chip is way behind expectations. The future enterprise focus will shift to L2+ chips.

At the tip of 2022, it was realized from throughout the Singgo staff that “Cambricon’s L4 chip is nearing completion and is expected to be released to the public in June 2023.” However, the interviewee added, “If the L4 chip does not meet market expectations, Hang Ge may also be finished.”

SEE ALSO: Cambricon SingGo Secures Investment From Bosch

In June of this 12 months, we as soon as once more consulted with inner R&D workers at Singgo concerning the progress of the L4 chip. The worker said, “The 5223 chip targeting L2+ has already been released, but there is currently no release plan for the 5226 chip targeting L4.” This assertion at the moment additionally to some extent confirmed the rumors that the brand new venture had been suspended.

The chip improvement didn’t meet expectations, and there have been additionally obstacles in product market promotion.

An insider from the chip trade has revealed that the Singgo staff is presently dealing with nice challenges of their enterprise. In order to safe a foothold, Singgo’s gross sales technique for OEM clients is to “give away 40,000 chips for free”, highlighting the urgency of acquiring a foothold.

Throughout, acquiring the designation from host producers has all the time been a prime precedence for chip corporations. There have been rumors that with the intention to safe the specified chip designation, Horizon Robotics CEO Yu Kai personally mobilized all elite personnel throughout the firm and fashioned a analysis and improvement staff of over 100 individuals to settle in Ideal, offering real-time technical help.

Not to say that Horizon Robotics, which already has dozens of designated host factories and is one other potential competitor within the high-performance chip market, has now obtained purchasers corresponding to Dongfeng and FAW Hongqi and is about to go public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

In addition to the 2 main gamers talked about above, increasingly more corporations are getting into the automotive chip market. This consists of rising star startups corresponding to HOUMO AI, HUIXI, EVAS Intelligence, AXERA AI, and even Momenta, which is famend for its clever driving algorithms, is forming a self-developed chip staff to make a huge impact.

The present state of affairs is just not optimistic, as many of the funds and abilities within the automotive chip market have been absorbed by Horizon Robotics and Black Sesame. According to trade insiders, “Horizon Robotics and Black Sesame have taken away 70% of the funds within the automotive chip market, making it more and more troublesome for chip startups that haven’t emerged but.

Team layoffs, L4 chip improvement falls in need of expectations. Can Cambricon Singgo nonetheless sing all the best way?

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