(ChinaIT.com) chip (also known as integrated circuit) refers to a silicon wafer containing an integrated circuit, which is very small in size. In electronics, it is a way to miniaturize circuits (mainly semiconductor devices, but also passive components, etc.), usually manufactured on the surface of semiconductor wafers.
From the perspective of application, cars are inseparable from a variety of chips, from tire pressure monitoring system TMPS and cameras to vehicle controllers and autonomous driving domain controllers. It can be said that the intelligence of the car is the intelligence of the chip.
If the mobile phone chip is the "brain" of the mobile phone, then the car chip is equivalent to the brain of the car. Among them, automotive chips can be mainly divided into three categories: "functional chips", "power semiconductors" and "sensors".
Function chips (MCUs), also known as "micro-control units", are various system functions such as electronic control systems, infotainment systems, powertrain systems, and vehicle motion systems in automobiles. If you want to operate normally, you need to use this type of functional chip to achieve it, and the most popular "automatic driving system" is inseparable from the function chip.
Automotive power semiconductors are mainly used in automotive power control systems, lighting systems, fuel injection, chassis safety and other systems, of which traditional fuel vehicles generally use it in the fields of start-up and power generation, safety and so on; new energy vehicles require a large number of power semiconductors to achieve frequent voltage conversion needs of vehicles, in addition, many parts of electric vehicles are also indispensable to the blessing of power semiconductors.
The car sensor is the input device of the automobile computer system, and its role is to convert various working conditions information in the operation of the car, such as vehicle speed, temperature of various media, engine operating conditions, etc., into electrical signals and transmit them to the computer, so that the car is in the best working state. For example, oxygen sensors, tire pressure sensors, water temperature sensors, electronic gas pedal position sensors, and so on.
In summary, car chips are very important for a car, in the three types of functional chips, power semiconductors and sensors, sensors are the smallest market share, but if there is no sensor car even the throttle can not move, now, I believe we understand why the lack of chips can not create a car.
How many chips does a car need?
In the past, the manufacture of a traditional car generally required to use about 500-600 chips, with the continuous development of the automotive industry, today's cars gradually from mechanical to electronic direction of development, cars do more and more intelligent, then the number of chips required is naturally more. It is understood that the average number of chips required per vehicle in 2021 has reached more than 1,000.
In addition to traditional cars, new energy vehicles are chip "big households", this kind of car needs a large number of DC-AC inverters, transformers, converters and other components, and these demand for IGBTs, MOSFETs, diodes and other semiconductor devices has also increased significantly, a better new energy vehicle needs chips may reach about 2,000, the demand is very amazing.
Li Shaohua, deputy secretary-general of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, pointed out that the current chip scale of the global semiconductor industry is between 300 billion US dollars and 400 billion US dollars. Among them, the car chip is about 40 billion US dollars, accounting for less than 10%, which will obviously cause a weak situation for car companies in scheduling production or competing for orders.
From the perspective of technical requirements, vehicle-grade chips are really prohibitive for most chip companies. Consumer electronics chip technology iteration is very fast, and car-grade chips are almost all more than a decade old technology, but although the technology is "outdated", the threshold has not been lowered. On the contrary, the high requirements of automotive grade chips for performance indicators, service life, reliability, safety, and quality consistency are difficult for consumer electronics chips to match.
Compared with consumer chips and general industrial chips, the working environment of automotive chips is more harsh: the temperature range can be as wide as -40 °C ~ 155 °C, high vibration, dust, electromagnetic interference, etc. Due to the personal safety issues involved, the reliability and safety requirements of automotive chips are also higher, and the general design life is 15 years or 200,000 kilometers. "Automotive-grade" chips undergo a rigorous certification process, including reliability standard AEC-Q100, quality management standard ISO/TS 16949, functional safety standard ISO26262, etc.
The high standards, strict requirements and long cycle of vehicle-grade chips will repeatedly raise the entry threshold, which directly leads to only chip companies with strong comprehensive capabilities or vertical integration capabilities and the ability to exert their scale advantages to the extreme can include vehicle-grade chips in the production list. Looking at the world, such vehicle-grade chip companies are also a few such as NXP, Infineon, Siemens, etc., and there are fewer monks and less porridge, which is also another reason for the shortage of automotive chips.
The mainland is striving to establish a perfect innovation ecology of the automotive chip industry and solve the shortcomings in the next development of the mainland automobile industry. Bydir, SAIC and many semiconductor companies in domestic car companies have successively entered the field of vehicle-grade chips.
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