Per reporter: Sun Lei Per editor: Pei Jianru
"After almost half a year of chip loss, governments have begun to pay attention to the relevant development of chip products and underlying core technologies to enhance the degree of localization." A few days ago, Xu Chao, vice president of Xinchi Technology, said in an interview with the "Daily Economic News" reporter that the supply of automotive chips or will return to normal in the second quarter of this year, but there will be a "lack of cores" in the future.
Xu Chao, Vice President of Xinchi Technology (Image source: Courtesy of the enterprise)
It is worth mentioning that the lack of automotive chips is also driving the restructuring of the relationship between the supply chain. Major car companies and Tier1 (tier 1 suppliers) have begun to bet on the chip field, or invest in major chip manufacturers, or reach in-depth strategic cooperation with major chip manufacturers. There is a view that capital and car companies have bet on the automotive chip track, and the real focus is not on the demand caused by the chip gap, but on the new track of betting on smart electric vehicles.
In the past era of automotive ECUs (electronic control units), giants such as NXP and Renesas accounted for most of the market. At the moment when autonomous driving and intelligent cockpit technology are developing rapidly, automotive chips not only need to have powerful computing power to process heterogeneous data from major sensors, but also need to have ultra-high bandwidth interfaces, and traditional functional chips can no longer meet the new needs of domain controllers.
In this context, China's automotive chip companies have also ushered in development opportunities, and the products of xinchi technology, horizon, black sesame and other enterprises have now been "on the car". According to Chen Shujie, chief brand officer of Xinchi Technology, the three products launched by Xinchi Technology, X9 (intelligent cockpit chip), G9 (gateway chip) and V9 (automatic driving chip), covering more than 70% of China's car manufacturers, obtaining more than 50 fixed points.
"2023 or the time when L3 mass production will erupt"
At present, in the field of autonomous driving chips, the sound volume of domestic manufacturers is small. This market has long been occupied by companies such as Mobileye and NVIDIA. It is worth mentioning that Mobileye and NVIDIA also represent two different routes in the field of autonomous driving chips, namely "closed faction" and "open faction".
It is understood that Mobileye provides car companies with a black box, that is, a "chip + algorithm" packaging solution, and the head car companies that pursue breakthroughs have no room for operation at the software level. In contrast, in addition to providing autonomous driving chips, NVIDIA also has a data acquisition platform, a neural network training platform, a simulation verification platform, and an autonomous driving software DriveOS, which can be used by car companies to develop autonomous driving technology.
Starting from the beginning of 2021, a number of new models have announced that they will be equipped with NVIDIA's strongest mass-produced autonomous driving chip, Orin SoC, including NIO ET7, Zhiji L7, R car ES33 and so on. Some people believe that the performance, development efficiency, flexibility, and development degree of autonomous driving chips will determine the market competitiveness of car companies and chip suppliers.
Like Nvidia, ChipCom technology has also adopted an open strategy. In 2021, Based on the V9 series of autonomous driving chips, ChipCom launched the UniDrive, an open platform for autonomous driving. Different from the "chip + algorithm" packaging model, the UniDrive platform adopts general-purpose computing hardware acceleration, which can be compatible with different autonomous driving algorithm routes.
In addition to the openness at the algorithm level, Chip Technology is also open at the hardware level. "At present, developers can use the autopilot chip of Xinchi Technology to achieve L2+ level autonomous driving research and development, and at the same time, they can also plug in ai acceleration units for L4/L5 level Robotaxi development." Tao Sheng, head of autonomous driving at Xinchi Technology, said.
Tao Sheng, head of automatic driving of Xinchi Technology (Image source: Courtesy of the enterprise)
For the current development of the automatic driving industry, Tao Sheng believes: "L2+ level automatic driving is the era that is happening, L3 ~ L5 level automatic driving is the future era, and Mercedes-Benz got the L3 level automatic driving certificate in Germany, indicating that 2023 may be the time point of the L3 level automatic driving mass production outbreak, and 2025 is the time point of large-scale research and development of L4 level automatic driving." ”
The cockpit and the autopilot chip are expected to merge into one
In addition to the open capabilities of chips and platforms, there is another trend in the field of autonomous driving - the E/E architecture of new energy vehicles is evolving from a distributed architecture to a centralized direction, and will evolve into a centralized E/E architecture in the future. At present, the intelligent cockpit domain and the automatic driving domain have taken the lead in moving towards centralization.
Zhang Hongzhi, vice president of Horizon and general manager of in-vehicle intelligent interactive products, once said: "The necessary premise for achieving advanced automatic driving is to integrate with the intelligent cockpit, only talk about automatic driving, do not talk about the intelligent cockpit is a waste of life and time." In the long run, cars are not only autonomous driving and intelligent cockpits, I believe there are more deep integration beyond imagination, such as integration with the surrounding environment information. ”
In this context, X-Chi Technology also launched the X9 series of intelligent cockpit chips. It is understood that the current X9U chip of Xinchi Technology can not only realize the integration of future intelligent cockpit functions such as voice, navigation, entertainment, and surround view, but also support ADAS functions such as DMS (driver monitoring system), OMS (passenger monitoring system) and automatic parking.
For the intelligent cockpit domain and automatic driving domain to be centralized, the person in charge of Xinchi Technology said that the intelligent cockpit domain and the automatic driving domain will take the lead in integration, and the independent cockpit chip and the automatic driving chip are expected to merge into one, which will greatly simplify the design complexity of the car wiring harness and reduce costs.
In addition, ChipCom also has G9 series gateway chips. As the data exchange center of the vehicle network, the G9 series gateway chip mainly plays an interactive role with X9, V9, and other functional modules and domain controllers. According to Xu Chao, in 2022, Singchi Technology will soon release ASIL D-level MCU chips, which can make the security level of the entire domain controller higher.
For the layout of the three product lines of "cockpit + gateway + automatic driving" of Xinchi Technology, some analysts said that in the selection of the core main chip of the centralized domain controller architecture, more and more car companies may choose the same vehicle-level chip manufacturer, the reason is that the software adaptability is better, which can greatly save the development cycle and cost.
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