In 2022, automotive sensors are the focus

For many practitioners of vehicle-grade sensors, 2021 is an extraordinary year. Since 2019, domestic automakers have opened a welcome door for domestic automotive suppliers, and so far sensor suppliers have realized the supply of vehicle-grade products. Affected by the current situation of the global chip shortage market, this year's vehicle-grade sensors have also achieved huge growth. Domestic vehicle-grade sensor companies have finally tasted the "sweetness" shallowly. Liu Weidong, general manager of Beijing Jiuhao Electronics, told reporters that the product sales in 2021 are roughly equivalent to the sum of the sales in the past six years.

Looking forward to 2022, the autonomous driving outlet will continue to boost the development of the industry. China's automotive sensor industry has not started for a long time, the practitioner technology is relatively weak, the customer base is not solid, and the market layout may have opportunities.

The number of L2 autonomous driving sensors has grown

Autonomous driving is the key point of breakthrough in the automotive industry in recent years. Next year, promoting the application of autonomous driving functions will continue to be the focus of the layout of car companies. At present, L2 level automatic driving is the focus of vehicle entry. Li Ke, vice president of CCID Consulting Co., Ltd., said that the trend of automobiles entering L4 has not yet arrived, and the functions of L2 are in mass production on a large scale. For self-driving companies to become profitable, they must start with mass production of L2-level products. Next year will be the year in which the number of sensors matched to L2 self-driving cars will grow.

Road observation is the most critical part of the process of realizing the automatic driving function of the car. New sensors such as vehicle cameras, millimeter-wave radar, lidar, and ultrasonic radar that achieve this function will become the most core incremental sensors in 2022 and beyond.

A greater number of sensors on the car has almost become the consensus of the industry. A greater number of sensors can bring more and more detailed information to the vehicle. The key to hindering the sensor from getting on the car is that the cost of the sensor is too high, and the second is that the increase in sensors brings higher pressure to the vehicle calculation. Regarding the reduction of sensor prices, the first is to promote the growth of the number of applications and promote the formation of a larger market, thereby bringing more room for car manufacturers to reduce prices. The second is to achieve breakthroughs in technology and production methods. To reduce the computational pressure of the vehicle system, Lei Shuyu, CEO and chairman of Feixin Electronics, said that distributed edge computing will become the object of choice in the market. The sensor itself is equipped with an edge computing module that vectorizes the raw data in the sensor, thereby reducing the computing and bandwidth transmission pressure of the central processing unit.

Autonomous driving technology has brought a larger market space for smart sensors, and also made sensors more intelligent and more computational requirements, or can become the next focus of sensor enterprise technology research and development.

Lidar price reduction is key

It has two major functions of ranging and drawing, restores three-dimensional characteristics, has a long detection distance and high detection accuracy. Lidar has a variety of requirements for adapting to the autonomous driving functions of vehicles. From a functional point of view, lidar seems to be the best choice for cars to achieve autonomous driving functions. Limited by the high price and other characteristics, the choice of lidar solution of the car companies is still in the minority.

At present, lidar seems to have the possibility of price reduction. In addition to the price reduction of a single lidar due to the increase in market size, the choice of new technical routes is also the development direction chosen by manufacturers. Pure solid state is recognized by the industry as the technical route of automotive lidar sensors. Leng Jianqing, senior director of AMS OSRAM Group and application center in Greater China and Asia-Pacific, said in an interview with China Electronics News that solid-state is the development trend of lidar. "All-solid-state lidar fundamentally makes the structure of lidar much simpler than traditional mechanical scanning." Lei Shuyu said that all-solid-state lidar can fundamentally reduce the production cost of lidar, thus becoming the technical direction of lidar products in the next few years.

In addition, to further improve the performance of lidar, improve the loading rate, improve the reliability of the application, improve the anti-jamming ability of lidar is also considered to be the key to the development of lidar technology. At present, most of the lidars on the market use pulse detection to calculate the distance between the vehicle and the object through the time difference between sending and receiving pulses. This detection method is very suitable when there are few vehicles, but if there are many vehicles around, and the vehicle is equipped with a lidar ranging device of the same technical route, it is impossible to determine which pulse is emitted by the lidar, and to get the exact ranging result, it is necessary to emit multiple pulses at the same time. Lei Shuyu believes that the use of pulse detection itself is due to the advantages of this technology to save electricity, but if the radar detectors interfere with each other, in order to avoid interference to send out more pulses, the pulse detection itself has the advantage of power saving. Therefore, lidar should highlight signal differences at the beginning of design.

Author 丨 Ji Xiaoting

Edited by Lian Xiaodong

American editor 丨 Maria