Focus: artificial intelligence, chips and other industries
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preface:
After experiencing the lack of cores and the impact of giant self-developed chips and new demand for semiconductors by new energy vehicles, the head car companies began to feel the need to design chips or participate in chip design.
As electric vehicles and next-generation automotive technologies begin to be put on the market, the demand for automotive semiconductors will continue to increase in the future, and domestic electric vehicles are bound to embark on the road of self-research.
The author | Fang Wen
Image source | network
Automakers' self-developed chips have become a new approach
Under the competitive pressure of global chip shortage and trade frictions, more and more automakers are entering semiconductor development in an attempt to establish a safer supply chain.
The benefits of self-developed chips are obvious, and they can achieve high intelligence in the industry in the shortest time, the highest efficiency and the smallest cost.
The core manufacturing of the car factory is ostensibly to cope with the shortage of automotive chips, but in fact it is to break the original industrial chain pattern.
After Tesla, including Weilai, Xiaopeng and other new car-making forces, and then many traditional car companies such as Volkswagen, Hyundai, geely, etc., have announced their plans for self-developed chips.
However, the new forces of car manufacturing cores may be more considered from the capital market, in the context of large-scale core shortage, bringing greater imagination space to the capital market.
In addition, new car-making forces are also seeking to change the previous pyramid-type automobile supply chain and compete with tier1 manufacturers for industrial discourse.
In fact, the cycle of self-developed chips is very long, and the probability of failure is very large, far from quenching the near thirst, especially for high-end chips such as autonomous driving chips, it is difficult to obtain results without long-term accumulation.
The core opportunity gives rise to challenges > crises
With the deepening of intelligent penetration in the future, the demand for automotive smart chips will grow explosively.
In January 2022, more than 370,000 smart cars were sold in the Chinese market, and intelligent chips have penetrated into the passenger car market.
BMW, BYD and Mercedes-Benz models equipped with smart chips have all sold more than 30,000 in a single month, and Tesla and Ideal have all been equipped with smart chips, and their monthly sales have exceeded 10,000.
In order to cope with the global chip shortage, chip manufacturers are already stepping up their efforts to meet the needs of the automotive industry, at the expense of heavy money to meet production, the chip crisis has also made car manufacturers and chip manufacturers establish a friendship.
Among them, the most affected is the automotive industry, due to the surge in shipments of new energy vehicles in 2021, directly driving the demand for vehicle-grade chips to increase significantly, and the lack of chips once affected the production capacity of new energy vehicles.
With the production capacity in 2022 doubling several times, it means that the process of chip localization will accelerate again, not only that, Midea also clearly stated that it will enter the power, power, IoT and other related fields in the future, and will lay out automotive chips.
The indispensable SiC chip for cars
In the process of automobile transformation from internal combustion engine to electrification, the transformation of Si to SiC is ushered in.
Compared to the Si technology used in traditional electric vehicles, SiC can increase battery range, improve its performance and shorten charging time.
In June last year, the first SiC electric drive system C sample of NIO ET7 was rolled off the production line, and NIO ET7 will be listed next year.
In November last year, Xiaopeng Automobile's new SUV model, the Xiaopeng G9, was the second mass production model in China to adopt SiC, and the first mass production model based on the SiC800V platform in China.
In February this year, Xiaopeng Motors invested in Shanghai Junxin Electronics, a siC power semiconductor and chip solution provider. At present, the company has become the first company in China to independently develop and master the 6-inch SiC MOSFET products and process platform.
On March 23, Ideal Automobile and Sanan Optoelectronics invested in the establishment of Suzhou SCO Semiconductor Company. This move is also speculated by the industry as a major move for the ideal to jointly lay out the SiC chip for vehicles with Sanan Semiconductor.
NIO set up an independent hardware team, Smart HW, to develop autonomous driving chips; last year, Hu Chengchen, who has extensive experience in chip front-end design, announced that he would join NIO. The industry speculates that with the addition of Hu Chengchen, Weilai's self-developed chip plan may be launched quickly.
Capital partnership is the best path
From the beginning of 2021, mainland car companies began to invest vertically in the chip industry on a large scale to lay out their own automotive chip supply chain.
Such actions mean that car companies and chip companies have jointly built cores, and have gradually moved from planning and layout to project landing.
The first benefit of cross-border cooperation between car companies and semiconductor companies is that domestic vehicle regulation-level chips have obtained more opportunities for car certification.
Investing in chip companies and carrying out capital cooperation may be the best choice for car companies to improve their chip supply chain at this stage.
As early as 2013, Musk proposed to develop autopilot chips, due to the lack of technology and talent reserves, Tesla could only cooperate with Mobileye in the early days, and the products it developed did not meet expectations, only reached the L2 level.
From 2015, when Tesla re-formed the team to lay out the autopilot chip, to 2019, Tesla officially released the first self-developed AP chip Autopilot HW3.0, Tesla has experienced five years.
Similarly, BYD Semiconductor, a leading enterprise in the field of domestic automotive chips, has also experienced a long period of technology cultivation and on-board verification.
Therefore, vertical capital cooperation with industrial chain enterprises is almost the best choice that domestic car companies can make at this stage to improve their chip industry chain supply chain.
Ending: Sooner or later, the automobile industry will embark on the old path of the mobile phone industry
On the one hand, car manufacturers and third-party chip manufacturers cooperate through [OEM self-research], and car manufacturers use the platform of chip manufacturers to quickly improve their research and development capabilities.
On the other hand, automakers will gradually seek to start with some edge devices and gradually achieve true self-development. In this process, third-party local auto chip manufacturers will shuffle their cards, and eventually several local giants will appear.
Part of the information reference: and non-network eefocus: "Depot core, is it reliable?" Semiconductor industry observation: "Wei Xiaoli's automotive chip layout", understand the way of the car: "2022 is still missing cores, The crisis of Chinese car companies or opportunities?" 》
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