For local core companies, this is an era full of opportunities.
On the one hand, under the development trend of intelligent electric vehicles, the capital of the automobile industry has accelerated to the supply chain end, and the core enterprises have more development funds and confidence. On the other hand, the transformation of the automobile supply chain under the "core famine" also provides time for local core companies to develop and catch up.
While this iceberg full of imagination space is floating out of the sea, bringing new excitement to the industry, we have also seen more local core companies come out, deliver a number of vehicle specification product lines in batches in a short period of time, and with more flexible response capabilities and more open development models, they have begun to be widely recognized and selected by OEMs.
It's time for the automotive supply chain to change
Since 2021, the information of strategic cooperative relations between OEMs and chip manufacturers has been endless, and more and more OEMs have chosen to establish closer cooperative relations with chip manufacturers. At the recent GTC conference, BYD also officially announced that it had reached a deep cooperation with Nvidia, and Wei Xiaoli was also actively grabbing NVIDIA Orin chips before.
Behind this, in fact, the electrification and networking of the automotive industry has become the consensus of the industry, and the demand for highly reliable and high-performance automotive chips in car companies has surged. According to IHS data, by 2030, the cost of automotive electronics in the car will increase to 45%, which is a huge potential market; at the same time, due to the rapid iteration of smart cars to adapt to application scenarios, the future needs customized chip products and rapid response services, which can only be satisfied by deepening the original supply chain system.
Based on such an industrial development trend, the main engine factory will have in-depth exchanges and joint development work with chip companies, compete to establish in-depth cooperative relations with chip manufacturers, intervene in the chip selection link earlier, and do some special optimization and definition based on the chip, coupling from function, performance to improve, and further integrate the vehicle architecture to achieve more ideal and personalized effects and release the imagination space of the new car design and planning stage.
With the acceleration of the "inner volume" of new car-making forces, the main engine factory also has new requirements for the mass production speed of the whole vehicle. This further prompts OEMs to strengthen dialogue with chip manufacturers.
At the same time, under the background of the automobile "core shortage" and geopolitical game, supply chain security has once again been pushed to the table, and accelerating the independent and controllable core links of the industry has become a common choice for upstream and downstream. In-depth collaboration with chip manufacturers will help OEMs strengthen the controllability of chip production capacity and ensure the safety and stability of the supply chain. OEMs have also designed alternatives at the chip level, providing a window for the development of local core companies.
"Domestic car companies are paying more and more attention to the safety of local supply chains, especially the impact of the epidemic and the lack of cores, and everyone is more willing to choose domestic car regulation chips." Qiu Yujing, CEO of The car chip company Xinchi Technology, said that in the past, it was necessary to get chip products and send samples to customers, and customers would be willing to try. "Now that customers have recognized the performance of Sing-Chi in the field of automotive chips, customers can now design according to our data sheet."
Compared with international manufacturers, local chip manufacturers are closer to the domestic automobile market demand, and have a more agile response ability, a more open development model and not to lose the international level of product power, in recent years, it has gradually begun to emerge, such as xinchi technology, horizon and other local core companies have been widely optimistic about the main engine factory and the capital market.
Among them, with a more open underlying architecture and a more complete product line, Xinchi has achieved orders for millions of chips in March 2021, and has now achieved mass production. According to Zhang Qiang, chairman of Xinchi Technology, at present, Xinchi's car specification chips have served more than 250 customers, covering more than 70% of China's car manufacturers.
The four major product lines of Xinchi Technology, picture source: Xinchi Technology
It is worth noting that the lack of core is only an accelerator, and the transformation of automotive electronic and electrical architecture is a deep demand that cannot be ignored.
"The lack of core is dynamic, it is impossible to be missing forever, and it will eventually return to the original demand for chip reliability of car companies." Xu Chao, vice president of Xinchi Technology, stressed in an interview with Gesz Automobile that the value point of the entire industry is still in product strength. "So fundamentally, it is still necessary to make the product stronger." At present, Xinchi Technology is also continuing to broaden the boundaries of its high-performance core products, trying to become bigger and stronger. ”
Launched a highly reliable vehicle specification MCU to accelerate all-scenario chip coverage
There is a basic framework for judging vehicle specification chips. Safety, reliability and long-term effectiveness are the core indicators that distinguish automotive semiconductors from consumer-grade semiconductors.
So how to get recognition in the core market? The first requirement is to solve the problems of safety, reliability, and longevity.
Xu Chao said, "In the field of the core, safety is above all else. No security, no performance. 70% of the core market is divided among the top five traditional manufacturers, which are characterized by a strong focus on reliability and safety. Therefore, when we participate in industrial competition, we must naturally do a good job in reliability and safety. ”
In addition to the layout of the intelligent cockpit X9, automatic driving V9, central gateway G9 three major vehicle specification SoC product lines, further enriched the product matrix, on April 12 released a high-performance high-reliability vehicle specification MCU E3 "control core" series of products.
Vehicle regulation MCU E3 "control core" series products released, image source: Xinchi Technology
It is reported that the target applications of E3 include the chassis by wire, brake control, BMS, ADAS/automatic driving motion control, liquid crystal instruments and other scenarios with extremely high requirements for safety and reliability, so a very high goal has been set in the design.
The E3 breaks through the high barriers of the car core, benchmarks and even surpasses international manufacturers such as Infineon, TI, and Renesas, and achieves Grade 1 in the vehicle specification reliability standard AEC-Q100, the functional safety level reaches ASIL D, and the dual-core lock step Cortex-R5 can achieve up to 99% diagnostic coverage. Globally, there are only a few existing vehicle specification MCUs that can meet both standards.
According to Qiu Yujing, in the first time of its establishment, Xinchi completed the iso26262 ASIL D highest functional safety level process certification, and then quickly obtained AEC-Q100 reliability certification, ISO26262 functional safety product certification and state secret certification, becoming the first "four-in-one" vehicle specification chip enterprise in China.
With the transformation of automotive electronic and electrical architecture, the demand for high-performance vehicle specification MCUs will become increasingly high.
According to market research institute IHS data, the global automotive MCU market size will be about $6.4 billion in 2020, and it is expected that by 2023, the global automotive MCU market size will be $8 billion.
It is understood that the E3 series products adopt TSMC's 22-nanometer vehicle specification process, based on arm Cortex-R5F architecture, and the CPU frequency is as high as 800MHz. The E3 has up to 6 CPU cores, of which 4 cores can be configured as dual-core locksteps or run independently, filling the gap in the domestic high-end high-security level vehicle specification MCU market.
Sun Mingle, chief architect of ChipCom, said that compared with the 100MHz MCUs used on the large scale of the current car, and some 200-300MHz high-performance MCUs, the improvement of the E3 main frequency is not only a digital change, but also a comprehensive improvement of processing power and real-time, which will bring richer applications to future cars, achieve smoother chassis control, ensure more accurate battery management, and perfectly support the service-oriented architecture required for future smart cars.
In addition, E3's five series of products (E3600/3400/3200 series, E3300 series and E3100 series) have a wealth of application scenarios, in addition to high reliability and high performance scenarios, can also be used for BCM, Gateway, T-Box, IVI and other low-power, high-integration applications.
Based on the effective "endorsement" of the previous launch of X9, G9, V9 series chips and the strong product force of the UniDrive autonomous driving development platform, E3 is popular with customers. Xinchi said that before it was officially launched, nearly 20 customers 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 Strategyverick expects that the coverage of MCU products in global OEMs and Tier1 will exceed its SoC products, that is, more than 70% of customers will choose CoreChi's E3 series products.
In addition, considering the high cost of parts switching of car companies, MCU products will enter the stable supply stage of more than 10 years once they are used, and it is difficult to be replaced, so the layout of The core chi is very accurate, and it also lays the foundation for its future expansion.
With the official release of the vehicle specification MCU product line, the four product lines of XCHI Technology's intelligent cockpit, automatic driving, central gateway and high-performance MCU have been fully implemented. As a "full-scenario, platform-based" chip product and technology solution provider, the above products of XCHI adopt a common underlying architecture. Zhang Qiang said that the platform-based through design not only greatly reduces the cost of research and development and time investment, but also can quickly improve the supply chain elasticity of car manufacturers and alleviate the risk of "lack of core".
SCCA 1.0, the central computing architecture of Chip Strategy, image source: Chip Technology
In order to meet the future era of central computing architecture, Singchi also took the lead in releasing the future-oriented "SICA 1.0" for the future. This architecture supports secure and reliable task deployment with flexible system scalability.
"Solve problems and create value." This incomparably simple logic is the most powerful business principle. And the continuous dead-end problem, when it is said, also lets us see the artificial "clumsiness" of the core chi.
The local core "start" is imminent, and the E3 series products of Xinchi Technology are expected to fill the gap of domestic highly reliable and high-performance vehicle MCU chips.