According to the news of the micro network, the Financial Times website recently pointed out that China's driverless car companies still have a high dependence on chips designed and produced by foreign companies.
The report quoted Deloitte data as saying that China's local chip design start-ups, such as Muxi Integrated Circuit, Biling Technology, etc. are growing rapidly, and in the first half of 2021, the domestic chip industry attracted $3.85 billion in venture capital, and thousands of chip design companies emerged. However, they are still years behind their U.S. competitors in terms of technology.
Consulting firm McKinsey predicts that by 2040, self-driving cars will account for 40% of new car sales in China, with vehicle sales revenue approaching $1 trillion and mobility services revenue approaching $1.1 trillion.
(China's autonomous driving market forecast, from the Financial Times)
According to the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association, China's fabless chip design companies are actively competing with manufacturers such as NVIDIA and Qualcomm, and have already won 16% of the global market share.
(Chinese mainland global share of the semiconductor industry, from the Financial Times)
In the field of autonomous driving, they are still trying to crack Nvidia's dominance, according to the American company's public information, at least 18 different Chinese system manufacturers use their chips for key parts of the autonomous driving project.
The list includes Antu, Wenyuan Zhixing, Didi and so on.
In addition to Nvidia, Geely's Extreme Kr has partnered with Intel's Mobileye to launch self-driving cars in 2024. Great Wall Motors, another of China's largest self-owned brand car companies, has partnered with Qualcomm to develop autonomous driving technology.
A Chinese semiconductor consultant, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Financial Times that China's homegrown automotive chip development remains plagued by a series of "fundamental issues."
The scale required to achieve competitive chips is difficult, and the high cost of chip development prevents many companies from entering this high-end market, achieving a viable cost-benefit trade-off, "China's largest car company produces about 1 million cars a year," the semiconductor consultant said, "the scale is far from large enough to fund long-term, leading self-driving chips." ”
Xiao Jianxiong, founder and CEO of AutoX Antu, said his company was concerned about possible delays in working with emerging players.
"We hope to act as soon as possible. We want to get self-driving cars to scale up quickly. Productivity is really important to us and the maturity of this ecosystem is really very helpful," he said of the collaboration with NVIDIA and its ecosystem of engineers and suppliers.
Another problem facing China is that for the most cutting-edge chips used in self-driving platforms, it is not realistic to make them locally, and overseas companies are also consolidating their dominance.
TSMC, the world's largest chip foundry, plans to add $44 billion in capital expenditures this year alone, compared to $5 billion planned by mainland rival SMIC. Most industry experts believe that SMIC is still about five years behind TSMC in terms of technology development.
The above semiconductor consultant believes that in the final analysis, self-driving cars must really "run", and delivery must consider issues such as scale, quality, shipments and cost, which cannot be ignored. The implication is that the dependence of these autonomous driving manufacturers and chip manufacturers on overseas foundries will also become a major test. (Proofreader/Rakukawa)