The six-month-long “2025 DSA International Innovation & Entrepreneurship Competition” concluded yesterday – and the local team won 500,000 patacas.
The contest’s finals were held at The Parisian in Cotai yesterday.
The contest was organised by RDSA Industry Alliance and the Macao Institute of Industrial Technology (MIIT), supported by Zhuhai Technology Industry Group Co. Ltd., Guangdong LeapFive Technology Co. Ltd., Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. School of Microelectronics Science and Technology, Sun Yat-Sen University, and the Beijing Institute of Technology (Zhuhai Campus).
According to a statement by the organisers, the theme of the contest was “Ultimate Innovation Boundaryless Symbiosis”. The contest aimed to break through the bottlenecks in AI computing power, attracting over 120 projects from more than 10 countries and regions to participate. Twenty teams advanced to the finals, competing for a total prize pool of 1,400,000 patacas and industry accolades.
Economic and Technological Development Bureau (DSEDT) Director Yau Yun Wah said that the local government was actively promoting the development of the technology industry, planning to establish a technology research industrial park, and vigorously cultivating new quality productive forces.
Yau underlined that the integrated circuit sector has become a key focus of this development. Macau will build high-end research and development platforms, improve its fund support system, and enhance entrepreneurial support services to create a significant hub for gathering international high-end innovation resources, Yau said.
According to MIIT vice-chairwoman and founder of the RDSA Industrial Alliance, Aglaia Kong Chio Fai, RISC-V’s DSA architecture presents three major opportunities for technological innovation in Macau. She also said in a speech that RISC-V’s open-source computing standards lower the barrier to innovation, enabling local talent to pursue entrepreneurship in AI on an equal footing. Kong also said that DSA supports customised hardware-software acceleration solutions for specific applications, fostering the potential emergence of “the next NVIDIA”. She also said that Macau can leverage its international advantages to integrate global hardware and software talent.
She highlighted DSA’s application potential in three key scenarios in Macau – smart energy conservation, tourist flow management, and high-frequency trading – where customised chips can achieve breakthroughs in energy efficiency and computing power.
Reduced Instruction Set Computing – Five (RISC-V) is an open-source hardware instruction set architecture (ISA) based on the principles of reduced instruction set computing (RISC). RISC-V is designed to be simple, efficient, and extensible, making it suitable for a wide range of computing applications, from embedded systems to high-performance computing, according to AI chatbot DeepSeek.
DSA (Domain-Specific Architecture) refers to a computer architecture designed specifically to optimise performance, efficiency, or power consumption for a particular application domain, according to DeepSeek
The award ceremony was also held at The Parisian yesterday. The contest was won by a Macau-based team named “AI Memory Universe (AIMOU)”.
According to a competition handbook, AIMOU is a startup team from the State Key Laboratory of Analog and Mixed-Signal VLSI at the University of Macau (UM SKL-AMSV).
The team’s winning work was titled “Versatile 2.5D Compute-in-memory Chiplets on RDL Interposer with RISC-V based Compiler for Universal NN Inference”
According to the competition’s handbook, Versatile 2.5D CIM chiplets (VersaCIM) and the RDL interposer dynamically optimise chiplet array granularity, dataflow, and memory allocation, achieving significantly improved energy-efficiency and scaling efficiency.
The book said that VersaCIM demonstrates up to 290 times higher system energy efficiency and 27 times higher scaling efficiency than state-of-the-art Al acceleration systems, while surpassing silicon interposer-based designs less than 70 percent lower cost.
* A Redistributed Debridged Layer (RDL) interposer is a type of substrate used in semiconductor packaging. “Debridged” refers to the process of removing or minimising the bridging of connections on a semiconductor, thereby allowing for more effective layout and integration of the circuitry. – Poe
This handout photo provided by the contest organisers shows Economic & Technological Development Bureau (DSEDT) Director Yau Yun Wah (left) presenting the first prize of the “2025 DSA International Innovation & Entrepreneurship Competition” to a representative of the Macau-based winning team, AI Memory Universe (AIMOU) at The Parisian in Cotai yesterday.
Macao Institute of Industrial Technology (MIIT) vice-chairwoman and founder of the RDSA Industrial Alliance, Aglaia Kong Chio Fa, delivers a speech before yesterday’s finals. – Photo: Armindo Neves
