Chips&Media, a semiconductor intellectual property (IP) specialist company, is showing strong performance. The news that it has developed a high-definition video-dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) appears to be influencing its stock price.
As of 9:27 AM on the 4th, Chips&Media was trading at 41,650 KRW, up 4,900 KRW (13.33%) compared to the previous trading day.
The CMNP developed by Chips&Media is a processor IP capable of executing artificial intelligence algorithm functions such as Super Resolution (SR), Noise Reduction (NR), and Object Detection (OD) all on the same hardware.
Super Resolution is a specialized technology that upscales low-resolution video to high-resolution video through deep learning-based algorithms, Noise Reduction is a technology that removes noise within the video, and Object Detection is a technology that automatically recognizes objects and identifies their location and size.
CMNP is implemented at about 10-20% of the size of a typical NPU, making it excellent not only in performance but also in cost reduction, and it is expected to become the best video-specialized solution in the artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor industry.
This NPU IP is expected to generate license sales starting next year targeting data centers, home appliances, cameras, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and autonomous vehicles that require high-definition video content analysis and playback demand of FHD, UHD or higher, as well as advanced real-time video processing technologies.
A company representative said, "Chips&Media has accumulated technological expertise in high-definition video processing over a long period. Amid the global competition among tech companies to develop NPUs, our company is now able to offer a solution business that provides both video-dedicated NPU IP and AI algorithms simultaneously, which we expect will enable us to secure a diverse customer base and quickly capture the market."
Through the NPU IP, Chips&Media has expanded its portfolio beyond its core video IP to include processor IP. The company plans to strengthen its position as a global IP company by acquiring related domestic and international technologies that can create synergy with its business.
The related industry hopes that a company like Nvidia, which is rapidly growing in the AI server market with high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs), will emerge domestically as well. Currently, Nvidia’s high-performance GPUs dominate the AI server market. Existing semiconductors, including GPUs, experience reduced speed and high power consumption and heat generation when performing complex computations. Tesla, Google, Microsoft, and others are investing heavily in NPU development. NPUs are AI-dedicated semiconductors modeled after the way the human brain processes information. They are specialized chips for machine learning (ML), where computers learn data and automatically improve results. In particular, compared to Nvidia’s GPUs, NPUs offer 10 times faster computation speed and only one-fifth the power consumption.
Chips&Media expects its NPU IP to play an important role in growth industries such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), drones, and autonomous vehicles. As generative AI like ChatGPT expands its analysis targets from text to images and videos, demand for video-related intellectual property is expected to increase explosively.
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