On October 30, industrial intelligent computer provider “Zhongke Times” completed A total of 300 million yuan A round and A+ financing several months ago. Among them, the A round of financing of 200 million yuan, the lead investor is Tianchuang Capital, the participants are Chinese Academy of Sciences Capital, China Capital, Cornerstone Fund, New Henglida, old shareholders Zhuoyuan Capital, Legend Venture Capital, Tongchuang Weiye and founding shareholders continue to follow the investment; The 100 million yuan A+ round lead investor is Bowill Capital, the participating investor is Zhongke Advanced Industry Fund, and Shallow Month Capital serves as the exclusive financial advisor. Since its establishment in August 2022, Zhongke Times has completed five rounds of financing in a row. Dr. Ma Jun, founder of Zhongke Times, said that this round of financing will be used to continue to increase the company’s investment in Automation (operating system and IDE), PC products and servo Motion and expand domestic and foreign markets.

Zhongke Times focuses on the development of industrial intelligent computers, to do “industrial automation and intelligence based on PC technology (a computer architecture) and software defined technology.” The technical source of the industrial intelligent computer project is academician Sun Ninghui, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and former director of the Institute of Computing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He proposed the development of industrial intelligent computer + software-defined technology system, which changes the current industrial computing market pattern dominated by traditional PLC, motion controller, industrial computer and edge server.

In terms of team, the core product research and development team of Zhongke Times comes from CAS Institute of Computing Technology, Alibaba, Beckhoff, Baidu, B&R, Siemens, Phoenix, KEBA, Schneider, Lead Intelligence, Huichun Technology, Dongtu Technology, Weihong Electronics, Ling Yunguang, Hollysys, Dawning, Lenovo, NIO, Ideal Automobile and other listed companies. Most have more than 15 years of experience in chip and hardware, virtualization and operating systems, automation and motion control.

With the wide range of applications of vision and AI in mobile phones, automobiles and other fields, the manufacturing process has higher requirements for computer “problem-solving” capabilities. The brain end of industrial computers has also begun to change, and is moving from traditional controllers to industrial intelligent computers. The products provided by Zhongke Times integrate all functions of PLC, industrial computer, motion controller, motion control card, industrial gateway and edge server in the original automation ecology, and launch “unified hardware + intelligent software”.

At present, Zhongke Times has successfully launched five PC products, Automation2.0 products have been close to Beifu in operating system performance, reaching the highest level in the industry, and there are I/O, servo drive, motor and upper computer software products. The whole, the division in time for the customer provide to PC for traction, Automation as the core, the IO/Motion/Acceleration/Digitization to form a complete set of flexible product portfolio.

Compared with traditional products, PC architecture products such as Zhongke Times, Beckhoff, B&R and Bachmann have four advantages:

First, in terms of performance, high-speed motion control speed and high precision, small jitter, after obtaining data and tasks, the PC controller calculation speed is one to two orders of magnitude faster than the traditional split architecture. Fast calculation speed, more accurate mechanical action, can be less than 50us;

Second, in terms of cost, compared with traditional equipment, PLC/ motion controller is responsible for execution, industrial computer is responsible for calculation, and the system is separate. By putting hybrid kernel + Type 1 virtualization + dual domain operating system into one machine, the hardware cost can be reduced to half or more;

The third is the openness of programming, which used to be done by multiple machines, each machine programming language is different. Now do not change the programming language can edit industry algorithms and applications in the unified programming platform;

The fourth is reliability, real time domain + non-real time domain to achieve the reliability mechanism of the dual domain operating system, to solve the user’s original user on the host computer blue screen and crash concerns.

According to Zhongke Times, at present, Zhongke Times’ products are the closest to Germany’s Beckhoff brand in terms of PC performance, and have received batch orders from benchmarking customers in advanced manufacturing (semiconductor, laser, 3C electronics), new energy (photovoltaic, wind power), process industry (oil, steel) and other industries. It is worth noting that more than 95% of the electrical components of the SX20 series motherboard are domestic, including the use of Haiguang 3 CPU chip and Cambrian graphics card to achieve artificial intelligence computing processing.

Ma Jun said: computerized automation is a huge industry transition opportunity, such as cloud computing, smart phones and smart cars have completed the computerized transition; Easy programming, high-powered terminals and new operating systems are key here; The mission of Zhongke Times is to achieve an open collaborative PC automation industrial system of “horizontal general industry + beyond the monopoly of foreign brands”.

In terms of production capacity and market, Zhongke Times signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Lenovo Group’s Southern Intelligent Manufacturing base, becoming the first seed customer of “Bright Plan”. On May 6, 2023, Lenovo Group officially released the “Bright Plan” of flexible manufacturing at the large-scale production ceremony of the Southern Intelligent Manufacturing Base. Bright Project “jointly initiated by Lenovo Group Southern Intelligent Manufacturing Base and Lenovo Venture Capital); With Lenovo’s rich experience in intelligent manufacturing, high-quality production efficiency and diversified services, Zhongke Times will gain great advantages in supply chain and globalization in the future. In terms of customer progress, the company has been recognized by many new customers in advanced manufacturing, new energy, process industry and other industries, such as Lead Intelligence, Ling Yunguang, Huawei, BYD, Tebian Electric, Gaojing Solar, SAN ‘an Optoelectronics, Guoneng Nissin, etc.;