Shanghai (ZXZC)- Hu Chengchen, former director of the Labs Asia Pacific of Xilinx, the world's largest programmable chip developer, has joined Chinese EV startup NIO this month as chief expert and assistant to vice president, according to Mr. Hu's personal Linkedin account.

As publicly disclosed, Mr. Hu was educated at Tsinghua University from 2003 to 2008 and holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Beijing-based university. In December 2010, he started working at  Xi'an Jiaotong University as an Associate Professor in the department of computer science and technology, and resigned in June 2017 as a full professor and the aforesaid department's director.

He joined Xilinx in August 2017. During his career in the chip development company, he led the Asia Pacific CTO office and the Asia Pacific labs' research team to explore heterogeneous computing (FPGA+CPU/GPU/Switching ASIC) opportunities to scale out IaaS/PaaS/SaaS in data centers and edge. He is accountable for Proof-of-Concept (PoC) systems prototyping, technology transferring, technical trend anticipation, technical and product planning, technical strategy implementation, and other businesses. He was also a member of Xilinx's Asia Pacific Council.

Plentiful automakers have suffered vehicle production loss due to the headwinds from the global chip shortage and are seeking proper solutions to mitigate the negative impact.               

In August, NIO's monthly deliveries reached 5,880 units, slumping 25.9% month on month due to the disruption in the vehicle production, which resulted from the pandemic-led chip supply constraints. The deliveries then rose to exceed 10,000 units in September after NIO’s Nanjing suppliers resumed production.

It was reported last year that NIO was planning the in-house development of autonomous driving computing chips. The project, which was still at its early stage, was said to be driven by William Bin Li, chairman and CEO of NIO.