In the past two years, the car manufacturers have been shrouded in the shadow of "chip shortage", since the end of 2020, the chip shortage has led to some car companies to stop production, not only cars, all kinds of chip-related manufacturers around the world have been more or less affected.
The wave of chip shortage in 2021 has affected car companies around the world, and the cancellation of non-essential shortage of chips or the delivery of fewer chips has become the norm for some car companies, such as Ideal Auto, which said that due to the shortage of chips for millimeter-wave radar, car owners can choose to deliver 3 radar versions (originally 5 millimeter-wave radars) and plan to replenish two other radars in the next few months. Assisted driving functions such as automatic parallel lane assist and automatic driving cannot be used after the two radars are reduced, but do not affect normal vehicle driving.
In addition to the forced suspension of some factories, Volkswagen's sales champion-level models have also been affected, Langyi cancelled the central control screen due to chip shortage, installed non-original after-sales navigation, and installed no MOS function and CRS3.0 related functions after installation.
Due to the shortage of chips, Audi has led to a reduction in model production and only provided a remote control key, and since July 5, 2021, some domestic Audi models have only provided one remote control key and one mechanical key tooth when delivered. It promised to issue a second key after the capacity was restored, and the affected models included audi A4L, Q5L/Q5L Sportback, A6L/A6L PHEV, and CKD e-tron.
In addition to the configuration, it is also obvious that the price of the car has risen, and then we will analyze how important the car chip is in the car, and why there is a shortage.
Automotive chips are roughly divided into three categories: functional chips, power semiconductors, and sensor chips.
The first category: functional chips, responsible for calculation and processing, there are AI chips responsible for automatic driving, intelligent cockpit and other functions, responsible for body stability systems, ECUs, ABS, drive systems, suspension systems and other functions of the MCU (micro-control unit) chip, MCU chips are also the most lacking chips in car companies.
The second category: power semiconductors, such as IGBTs, are mainly used in electric vehicles and are the core devices of energy conversion and transmission
The third category: sensor chips, used for airbags, radar, tire pressure monitoring and other functions.
What makes chips so scarce?
There are about 500-600 chips of various types used in a traditional fuel vehicle, and about 1000-2000 new energy sources.
The most shortage of MCUs also needs dozens to hundreds of traditional fuel vehicles, and the new energy source is 1 times that of traditional cars.
The first is the problem of factory capacity in its current state
In the past two years, the surge in online office from home has surged, and the corresponding sales of monitors, tablets, home network devices, etc. have surged, and even the demand for webcams has increased significantly.
In fact, car chips are far less than the technical requirements of mobile phone chips, some mobile phone chips can reach the process of 5nm, car chips only need 28nm, but both have different difficulties to break.
First of all, an important responsibility of automotive chips is to ensure reliability, to ensure product quality, compared to the chips on ordinary equipment, automotive chip detection and sampling is also more stringent than ordinary semiconductors, such as -40 degrees Celsius to +175 degrees Celsius operating temperature range, and even a wider range of temperature and voltage, the number of cycle experiments on temperature is more, and the life test cycle is longer than the 10 years of ordinary chips, set at 20 years. At the same time, in the inspection, ordinary chips are sampled, while car chips need to be 100% inspected.
The second is the issue of production costs and profits
The mainstream consumer-grade chip manufacturers have hardly been involved in the production of vehicle-grade chips, and the life and development time of automobile design are much longer than that of mobile phones, so the vehicle-grade chips need to have a certain forward-looking, coupled with the characteristics of the long industrialization cycle of the vehicle-grade chips and the high threshold of the supply system, which has produced a great test of technology, production, cost and other aspects of the manufacturers, and every move will be calculated in years, and the deep integration with the main engine factory has not obtained considerable profits at the same time.
Finally, there is the issue of raw materials
Automotive chip factories and mobile phone chip factories also purchase raw materials from fabs - wafers. The scale of demand for vehicle-grade chips is far less than the scale of consumer-grade chip demand, coupled with the surge in demand for electronic products, resulting in insufficient fab capacity, so to a certain extent, it will give priority to meeting the higher profits of consumer-grade chips, which is also one of the reasons for the current shortage of automotive chips.
At the beginning of 2022, Toyota announced on its official website in Japan that the delivery date of the Land Cruiser order after January 19, 2022 may be 4 years later. But this is only in the face of Japan's own notice, the local Land Cruiser sales are not very much, the overseas market is currently in normal supply, but it can also be seen that the total shortage of chips and accessories is still affecting car companies around the world.
summary
During the period of chip shortage, there have been successive situations such as the reduction of touch function of the central control screen caused by the chip shortage, the car key is only provided, the chip shortage leads to the reduction of seat heating, etc. When the chip is found to be closely related to our lives, we realize that the simple functions used daily have such cumbersome technical support.
It also proves that from the late starting time, the domestic automobile production level has reached such a high level in just a few decades, which is inseparable from the cultivation and dedication of generations of auto people, just like the prosperity of the motherland, and the hard work of generation after generation.