Baker Street Detective Officer, author 丨Lu Zhenxi
On the last day of February, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology sent an important signal to the market, according to its monitoring of key automobile companies, although there is still a certain gap in chip supply in terms of the demand and scheduling of vehicle and parts companies, but due to the continuous release of global new chip production capacity, the supply relationship is expected to further improve.
At the same time, in the future, China will increase production coordination. Guide vehicle and parts enterprises to optimize the layout of the supply chain, rationally schedule production, help each other, improve the efficiency of resource allocation, and minimize the impact of core shortage. Further support the collaborative innovation of vehicle, parts and chip enterprises, and improve the domestic chip production and supply capacity in a safe and orderly manner.
Out of stock, it will inevitably be accompanied by price increases
According to the simplest economic principles, the change in chip supply relationship will definitely be reflected in product prices.
According to the SEG Electronics Market, the largest semiconductor trading market in Shanghai, since the shortage of automotive chips, the core chip of a body electronic stability system produced by STMicroelectronics has been speculated from 20 yuan to 2800 yuan without tax in the previous year, and does not include tax.
At this stage, the price of most automotive chips is rising, and the increase is several times small. Some insiders said that since last year, affected by the epidemic, the production capacity of chip factories in Southeast Asia and other places has fallen sharply, and the supply of automotive chips has exceeded demand. In addition, the hoarding of chip dealers is also an important reason for the soaring price of automotive chips.
In this context, the production line concentrates on the world's major power management ICs for automotive and industrial MCUs, as well as power semiconductor suppliers, Infineon issued a notice to dealers that the imbalance between supply and demand of semiconductor production capacity will run through the whole year of 2022, and the company can no longer digest the increased costs under the influence of rising cost structure. The letter was interpreted by the market as an intention to "distribute the burden on a broad basis." "That is, to increase the price of the product."
In fact, since 2020, the domestic automotive industry has been plagued by chip shortages, according to industry insiders, in the case of the industry as a whole "lack of cores", nearly 15% of the production capacity of Chinese cars will be affected, according to the production capacity of 2.683 million Chinese cars in 2019, there will be 400,000 vehicles of production capacity affected.
Among them, the main control chip MCU + power class power chip, driver chip, accounting for 74% of the missing core, followed by the signal chain CAN/LIN and other communication chips.
The reason why the shortage of automotive chips has such a big impact on the domestic vehicle industry is mainly because the price of international automotive electronic chips was low before, and in line with the concept of "you can buy it without doing it yourself", domestic supply is heavily dependent on overseas imports.
From the perspective of the industrial chain, the mainland automobile production and sales account for about 33% of the world, but automotive semiconductors and other parts mainly rely on overseas suppliers, China's automotive semiconductor output value accounts for less than 5% of the global share, and some key parts and components imports account for more than 80% to 90%.
Under the disturbance of the epidemic in 2020, domestic companies have understood the importance of chip production capacity in their own hands.
Self-developed automotive chip pattern
As the saying goes, "Spring River Plumbing Duck Prophet", domestic vehicle companies have long begun to lay out related chip product research and development, which is significantly different from the mobile phone companies represented by Xiaomi and so on.
In April 2018, one of the new forces of car manufacturing, "zero-run car", jointly developed AI automatic driving chips with Dahua Co., Ltd., and now the company's self-developed chips have long been landed, as of February 2022, the company has delivered vehicles for 11 consecutive months year-on-year, an increase of 447% year-on-year in February this year, and 11,520 vehicles have been delivered in 2022, about 26.72% of the total of 43,121 units last year.
As a traditional car company with a relatively successful transformation, BYD has become the only new energy vehicle manufacturer in the world that has mastered the core technology of "three electrics". In addition, the company's "Shenzhen BYD Microelectronics" developed vehicle grade IGBT chips, has occupied 18% of the market share, at least 7 domestic car companies have cooperated with BYD.
In addition, Xiaopeng Automobile has also previously entered the field of self-developed automotive chips, and even the home appliance company Midea has crossed over to enter the self-developed automotive chips, but the progress is not satisfactory.
However, according to the statistics of Tianfeng Securities, the current localization rate of automotive electronics in the mainland is less than 1%, and the huge market space has brought huge domestic substitution dividends to the enterprises.
At the production end, because most of the corresponding car rules chips are mature process chips, the domestic has long been equipped with 28nm mature process chip manufacturing capacity, and in the field of packaging and testing, with changdian technology, Tongfu Microelectric, Huatian Technology and other three global TOP10 enterprises, the domestic industrial chain is enough to cope with the car regulation chip manufacturing, and at the same time due to the epidemic prevention and infrastructure capabilities of other countries, the domestic car regulation electronic chip industry chain is expected to further replace the production capacity of overseas manufacturers, that is, the global automotive semiconductor production capacity has the opportunity to transfer to China.
Specifically, the localization rate of automotive computing and control chips is less than 1%, the localization rate of sensors is less than 4%, and the localization rate of power semiconductors, memory, and communications is 8%, 8%, and 3%, respectively.
The low localization rate of vehicle regulation electronics is mainly caused by the long-term operation strategy of domestic car companies relying heavily on imports, which causes the environment to not pay attention to the field of chip design, so the localization of vehicle regulation chips can be described as "innate deficiency". Secondly, there is no domestic vehicle regulation standard, foreign AEC-Q and AQG324 and other standards are not satisfied in the domestic soil, can not adapt to the development of new energy vehicle technology in the mainland, and the lack of vehicle regulation standards and verification system, which directly leads to the lack of verification opportunities for vehicle regulation products and the weak ability of industrial supporting links.
Taking 2020 as an example, the top five major chip factories in the world are Infineon, NXP, Renesas, Texas Instruments, and STMicroelectronics. In the top 25, only Wingtech Technology is a domestic listed company, and it only ranks 19th.
Although there are a large number of companies in China, they are in the second or even third echelon. For example, the main business includes IGBT chips of Star Semiconductor, Silan Micro, etc.; in the field of automotive intelligence, Jingchen Shares, Rockchip, Beijing Junzheng, Weier Shares, Gigabit Innovation, etc. are the head enterprises; other subdivisions include Montage Technology, Zhongke Chuangda, etc., which may be the head enterprises in China, but in the world, the competitiveness is poor.
Where is the "crisis" and "opportunity" of domestic chip car regulations
In the era of new energy vehicles, the above problems are not solved, which will directly restrict the further improvement of the intelligence of domestic vehicles. Because the current computing power of new energy vehicles mainly comes from MCU chips, the future will be widely popularized with automatic driving, in order to cope with complex scenarios such as urban roads, the automatic driving system needs to further improve the computing power.
Based on this, if we want to further improve the degree of intelligence in the vehicle industry, we must realize the transition from MCU to SoC. Because a single-function chip can only provide simple logic calculations and cannot provide strong computing power support, the new EE architecture promotes the transition of automotive chips from single chip-scale chip MCUs to system-on-chip SoCs.
In this context, compared with the steady growth of automotive MCUs, the SoC market has significantly increased, according to Global Market Insights data, the global automotive grade SoC market may reach $16 billion in 2026 from $1 billion in 2019, with an average annual compound growth rate of 35%, far exceeding the overall growth rate of automotive semiconductors in the same period.
Taking the cockpit as an example, the penetration rate of the digital cockpit continues to increase, the number of cars continues to increase, the screen size continues to increase, the smart cockpit is rapidly popularized, and the multi-screen of one core has gradually become the mainstream, which has also driven the rapid release of the smart cockpit SoC chip.
SoC applications in smart cars mainly have two aspects: intelligent cockpit and automatic driving, compared with automatic driving SoC, cockpit domain SoC has become the forerunner of SoC landing smart cars due to relatively low requirements. Qualcomm, NXP, Texas Instruments, Intel, MediaTek and other companies continue to update their cockpit SoC products, in the high-end digital cockpit domain, Qualcomm currently presents a monopoly position. In the field of autopilot chips, CPU + XPU is the current mainstream.
But this does not mean that the vehicle specification MCU will be eliminated by history, on the contrary, for a long time to come, MCU chips will grow steadily, and because they are mature processes, domestic chip factories are enough to cope with their production. Because the MCU chip is the main chip of the vehicle ECU chip, it is also the basic unit of the EE architecture, and each ECU is responsible for different functions.
Depending on the requirements, MCU chips can be divided into 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit.
Among them, the 8-bit MCU is mainly used in the lower end control functions of each subsystem of the car body, including windows, seats, air conditioning, fans, wipers and door control.
The 16-bit MCU is mainly used in powertrain systems, such as engine control, gear and clutch control and electronic turbine systems, etc., and is also suitable for use in chassis mechanisms, such as suspension systems, electronic power steering wheels, electronic brakes, etc.
Key applications for 32-bit MCUs include dashboard control, body control, and some emerging smart and real-time safety features. Among the mainstream MCUs in the current market, 8 and 32 are the two largest camps. This also means that the higher the vehicle intelligence rate, the greater the demand for MCU chips and the higher the ceiling of market capacity.
According to IC Insights estimates, the global MCU market size is expected to reach $8.8 billion in 2026 from $6.5 billion in 2020, with an average annual compound growth rate of 5.17%, slightly lower than the growth rate of automotive semiconductors in the same period. At the same time, the development of mainland MCU is in tandem with the world, and the market size is expected to reach 5.6 billion yuan in 2026, with an average annual compound growth rate of 5.33%, which is basically the same as that of the world in the same period.
At this stage, not only is the MCU market in the domestic market controlled by overseas manufacturers, but the global market also shows a more obvious oligopolistic competition situation. CR7 accounted for 98%, mainly because the downstream certification cycle of vehicle-grade MCU chips is long, and companies do not dare to change suppliers easily.
At present, NavInfo has entered the MCU market through the acquisition of Jiefa Technology, as well as entertainment information system IVI SoC chips, automotive audio power amplifier AMP chips, etc., forming a smart car business based on navigation business, advanced assisted driving and automatic driving business, car networking business, chip business, and location big data service business.
In addition, there are five major areas of light court information in the main layout of intelligent cockpit, intelligent electronic control, intelligent driving, test tools, and map services, as well as Desay SV, which involves intelligent cockpit, intelligent driving and network services, etc., all of which contribute to the localization of smart vehicles.
It is believed that with the joint efforts of the entire industrial chain, the automotive intelligent industry chain will eventually usher in the day of domestic substitution.