Is the era of domestic core full replacement, card neck going to pass?
Wen 丨 wisdom driving network Wang Shuoqi
The car lacks cores, missing nearly 2 years, and until now this situation has not been alleviated.
Chips have also become a lot of car brand manufacturers, forever painful.
But this situation is changing, today (April 12), the car chip company Core Chi Technology released a high-performance, highly reliable car rules MCU E3 "control core" series of products.
According to Chip Technology, the chip can be fully applied to applications with high safety and reliability requirements, such as by-wire chassis, brake control, BMS, ADAS/automatic driving motion control, LCD instrumentation, HUD, streaming media vision system CMS, etc.
The E3 series of X-Chi Technology is based on ARM Cortex-R5F, with a CPU frequency of 800MHz.
The E3 has up to 6 CPU cores, of which 4 cores can be configured as dual-core locksteps or run independently, which fills the gap in the domestic high-end high-security level automotive MCU market.
The E3 full range of MCUs adoptSMC's 22nm vehicle specification process. Xinchi Technology said that when the chip was not officially launched, nearly 20 customers had designed products based on E3 in advance.
At present, the full range of E3 products has been open to customers for sample and development board applications, and it is expected to achieve mass production in the third quarter of this year.
Chip-Chi will provide complete tool chain support from chip to development kit and design solution, and is committed to creating a complete ecosystem for users.
With the release of the automotive MCU product line, the "chip family" of XCHI Technology has completed the comprehensive coverage of the four major application areas of intelligent cockpit, automatic driving, central gateway and high-performance MCU.
The combination of these four MCU chips has formed the hot concept of "central computing platform".
At the same time as the release of the MCU E3 series, Chip Company took the lead in releasing the future-oriented "Chip 1.0 Central Computing Architecture SCCA 1.0".
This architecture supports secure and reliable task deployment with flexible system scalability.
Founded in June 2018, Chip Technology is a supplier of "all-scenario, platform-based" chip products and technical solutions, and is also the first vehicle specification chip enterprise in China to achieve "four certificates in one", and its four series of products all adopt a common underlying architecture.
The so-called four-in-one refers to the fact that XCHI has completed the ISO26262 ASIL D highest functional safety level process certification, AEC-Q100 reliability certification, ISO26262 functional safety product certification and national secret certification.
Here we briefly introduce these two certifications:
Among them, AEC-Q100 certification is known as the "basic threshold" for the chip to be installed on the car, which is mainly aimed at the specification of reliability assessment, that is, to ensure that the chip that passes the test can be reliable and usable for a long time, that is, it is not damaged.
ISO 26262 certification is known as the "admission ticket" of the automotive supply chain, which needs to meet the consideration and certification of functional safety mechanisms, which is divided into functional safety process certification and functional safety product certification, focusing on controlling random hardware failures and avoiding the occurrence of systematic failures.
The industry's relatively common view of the vehicle specification chip generally needs to pass the reliability test certification + functional safety process certification + functional safety product certification, in order to fully meet all the requirements of the vehicle regulation certification, can be called "vehicle specification chip".
In addition, it should be clear that the most scarce chip of automobile manufacturers is this type of vehicle-grade chip.
Zhang Qiang, chairman of Xinchi Technology, said that the use of platform-based through design not only greatly reduces R&D costs and time investment, but also quickly improves the supply chain elasticity of car manufacturers and alleviates the risk of "lack of core".
It is understood that at present, the core chi car specification chip has achieved large-scale mass production, serving more than 250 customers, covering more than 70% of China's car factories, of which the more well-known manufacturers are FAW, Dongfeng, SAIC, Chery, Zero Beam Automobile and other brands.
Previously, Xinchi Technology has successfully built the automatic driving chip "Driving Core" V9, the intelligent cockpit chip "Cabin Core" X9 and the central gateway processor "Network Core" G9.
The V9 of The Core's autopilot chip integrates high-performance CPU, GPU and AI processing engines, and through rich sensor interfaces, cars can simultaneously collect data from multi-channel cameras, lidar, and millimeter-wave radar to complete the autonomous driving process from perception, positioning, planning decision-making and control.
Based on the V9 processor, XCHI also built a fully open autonomous driving platform UniDrive, which has the characteristics of low latency, high efficiency and high safety.
In the second half of the year, Chip Corp will also launch a single-chip autopilot processor with a computing power of 200TOPS.
The platform's biggest competitor in the country is Horizon.
The intelligent cockpit chip "Core of the Cabin" X9 can drive up to 10 high-definition displays such as instruments, central control, rearview mirrors, rear entertainment, etc. through one chip at the same time, and support multi-screen sharing and interaction.
Xinchi Technology said that the current Xinchi X9 has successfully won dozens of heavy fixed-point models and achieved large-scale mass production.
It has achieved comprehensive coverage of local, joint venture plants, and new car-making forces, and has begun to join hands with international automakers such as BMW, Volkswagen, and Toyota.
The G9, the central gateway processor of XCHI Technology, has a wealth of interfaces to support seamless data exchange between different body networks such as CAN, LIN, and Ethernet, and also supports access to 5G/C-V2X networks.
Nowadays, with the release of the MCU E3 "Control Core" series of products, the product camp and sequence of Chip Technology have been further completed.
It is reported that the MCU E3 series products can be fully applied to the chassis-by-wire, brake control, BMS, ADAS/automatic driving motion control, LCD instrumentation, HUD, streaming media vision system CMS and other applications with high safety and reliability requirements.
According to Xinchi Technology, the E3 MCU has set very high stability and safety goals at the beginning of the design, that is, the vehicle specification reliability standard has reached the AEC-Q100 Grade 1 level, and the functional safety standard has reached the ISO 26262 ASIL D level.
In future EE architectures for central computing, the processing power of MCUs will also need to be rapidly improved.
The E3 series of products of XCHI Technology has a CPU frequency of up to 800MHz and has up to 6 CPU cores, of which 4 cores can be configured as dual-core lock steps or independent operation, filling the gap in the domestic high-end high-security level vehicle specification MCU market.
At the same time, E3 "Control Core" 5 series of products have flexible configuration, CPU has single core, dual core, quad core and six cores, the main frequency from 300MHz, 400MHz, 600MHz to 800MHz, integrated a wealth of communication peripheral modules, built-in hardware accelerators that meet the 2/3/4/9 standard of Guomi Shangmi, and also support BGA and LQFP packages.
At present, the advanced central computing architecture of the automobile is divided into Tesla's AMD school, Huawei genre, Nvidia school, although the core chi technology is not currently focused on the process, computing power, efficiency, but to solve the current shortage of chips problems, to achieve the huge progress of China's automotive chip mass production, and in this era of lack of cores, but also gives the core chi technology a huge market opportunity.
A noteworthy phenomenon is that on the distribution of Xinchi Technology, the heads of top investment institutions such as Great Wall, Changan, FAW, Geely, SAIC, as well as Top Investment Institutions such as Matrix Partners Venture Capital, Walden International, Lenovo Venture Capital, Sequoia Capital, Heli Capital, and Pro Capital have sent videos to endorse new products of Xinchi.
Xinchi Technology, a young chip company, is becoming the darling of capital along with Horizon, Black Sesame Intelligence, and Superstar Future.
The core chi technology simultaneously lays out the vehicle specification chip and the intelligent driving chip, and its future imagination space is larger.
However, it should be pointed out that Chip Technology is still a chip design company, and its manufacturing links still rely on TSMC.
China's automotive industry chain chips, and even the chips needed for digital products, when independently controllable, the need for the common development of the entire chip industry chain, lithography machine is still a threshold, but let people see the hope is that china's chip industry investment is booming, emerging companies emerge in an endless stream, and the Chinese market is the world's largest chip market, which provides a huge application space for local chip companies.
【Pay attention to the frontier of intelligent driving, pay attention to the video number of intelligent driving】