Alibaba starts Pingtogue Semiconductor

Pingtogue will start off as an amalgamation of C-Sky Microsystems, the China design house acquired by Alibaba in April, and the IC R&D team at Alibaba’s DAMO (Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and Outlook) Academy.

The company, to be called Pingtogue Semiconductor, is to target AI SoCs and embedded processors.

The idea is to use Pingtogue proprietary ICs in Alibaba’s cloud and IoT activities.

Zhang Jianfeng (pictured), Alibaba’s CTO who also heads up the DAMO Academy, says that Pintogue’s first IC will launch in April 2019.

It will be a neural network chip called Ali-NPU, for image analysis and machine learning.

The second product, also due next year, will be its CK902 series of embedded network security ICs.

Zhang was also reported to have said that standard quantum conputing ICs, deceloped at Alibaba’s quantum computing laboratory, would be launched in two to three years.

The lab is working on 81-bit random quantum network simulation.