This year's Beijing Auto Show can be called a carnival of traffic, with various independent brand car companies supporting each other, pushing the popularity of the auto show to an unprecedented climax.
Driven by intelligence and electrification, China's auto companies have risen rapidly and deserve praise. However, behind the prosperity, the upward breakthrough of domestic auto suppliers is also worth paying attention to.
In recent years, the "domestic substitution" of the automotive supply chain has been mentioned more and more frequently, especially in the field of chips, control MCUs, computing SoCs, power IGBTs and SiCs, as well as various sensor chips, have become a popular track for domestic chip manufacturers to enter.
Among the complex automotive-grade chips, the automotive SerDes chip is a relatively niche track, but under the high-speed data transmission demand generated by high-end driving assistance, intelligent cockpit and other functions, the application potential of the automotive SerDes chip is being rapidly released at a pace that exceeds expectations.
Looking at the automotive SerDes chip market, the Matthew effect is very significant, the head manufacturers have a high degree of product maturity and a stable market position.
During the Beijing Auto Show, a blockbuster news in the field of on-board SerDes added another important touch to the domestic automotive chip industry: Renxin Technology released a new on-board communication chip - R-LinC, which supports the transmission rate in the range of 16Gbps-1.6Gbps, the transmission distance is up to 15 meters, and the insertion loss compensation capacity can reach more than 30dB.
"R-LinC is the world's first automotive SerDes chip with 16Gbps + 22nm specifications, and is currently 1-2 generations ahead of its peers in terms of speed and process. Dang Weiguang, founder and CEO of Renxin Technology, is full of confidence in the company's new products.
Weiguang Dang, founder and CEO of Renxin Technology
In just two years, how did Renxin Technology leap from a new army in the industry to an important force of "China Chip"? After in-depth exchanges with the company's founder team, the author believes that Renxin has done several things right: first, to find the right track, secondly, to deeply understand customer needs, and finally to achieve cost reduction and efficiency increase of system solutions.
The demand for high-speed communication is emerging, and the automotive SerDes market is exploding
The amount of data in the traditional car is low, and the communication network only needs to meet the requirements of the engine, gearbox, seat, window and other components and functions, and there are no strict requirements for bandwidth and transmission rate.
With the evolution of automotive electronic and electrical architecture, distributed ECUs have been greatly reduced, functions have been integrated into the five domains, more and more sensors have been put on the car, and the degree of vehicle intelligence has been continuously improved. In this process, high-bandwidth, high-speed, and low-latency data transmission has become a hard requirement, and this demand will continue to expand under the trend of cross-domain convergence.
In the case of ADAS systems, in order to cope with more complex driving assistance scenarios, it is necessary to collect massive amounts of perception data, and the number of perception sensors has increased exponentially.
Suppose a NOA-enabled smart car is equipped with 11 cameras, three of which are 8 million pixels and eight are 2 million pixels, with a frame rate of 30 FPS, which means that the data input rate requirement of the entire system may reach 1.2 billion pixels per second. If you add the amount of data from sensors such as millimeter-wave radar and lidar, the total bandwidth requirement may reach 25 Gbps.
Not only that, but the application of larger size, higher resolution, higher refresh rate, as well as through-screen and triple-screen screens, not only brings customers an improved sensory and interactive experience, but also rises to a new dimension in terms of data communication bandwidth.
As a leading high-speed serial data transmission solution, the goal of automotive SerDes technology is to solve the current pain points of the industry in terms of transmission rate and bandwidth. By splitting several parallel data pieces and transmitting them in serial mode, the data format is converted to parallel at the receiving end. To put it simply, the on-board SerDes chip is responsible for the transmission of high-speed data in the car, such as transmitting the data collected by the camera to the SOC chip for calculation and analysis.
There is no doubt that the competition of automotive intelligence has entered a white-hot stage, and the market demand for on-board SerDes chips is very strong.
"According to the Chinese market is expected to reach 30 million new car sales in 2025, if the average assembly volume of SerDes chips per car is 10, the annual shipment of SerDes chips will reach about 300 million. "Dang Weiguang is very optimistic about the future development of automotive SerDes. Thanks to the development of new energy vehicles, connected technologies, and autonomous driving, the chip value of on-board SerDes bicycles will continue to increase, making them a market with great potential.
It is worth mentioning that in the two years since its establishment, Renxin Technology has completed 4 rounds of financing with a total of 300 million yuan, which reflects the continuous optimism of all parties in the industry chain about the on-board SerDes track and the high recognition of Renxin Technology. Recently, the company officially announced the completion of nearly 100 million yuan of Pre-A++ round of financing, this round of financing led by Yangtze River Zhongda Xiwei, followed by new and old shareholders such as Dianlian Shengde Venture Capital Fund and Rongyi Investment, the raised funds will be mainly used for the large-scale mass production of the first generation of 16Gbps high-performance vehicle SerDes products, the promotion of full-scene applications and the construction of a full-process customer service team.
Speak with product power and strive to break the Matthew effect
Opportunities and challenges always coexist, especially in the field of automotive SerDes chips. The two leading international manufacturers have been dominant for a long time, forming a Matthew effect. Due to the existence of high technical barriers, high investment in research and development and long cycle are unavoidable hurdles, new domestic players want to take root in this market, need to overcome many obstacles, in order to achieve a breakthrough in the automotive SerDes chip from 0 to 1.
As for how to break the game, Renxin Technology has its own views. "Industrial upgrading + technology iteration is an opportunity for Renxin to break the situation!" Dang Weiguang made it clear that the company's R&D strategy is very clear, by achieving a higher level than the industry's top level in product performance, creating high-speed, stable and cost-effective solutions, building the core competitiveness of products with differentiated routes, and providing full support for customers' product breakthroughs.
Specifically, at the beginning of development, Renxin Technology set a very challenging strategic goal. In terms of transmission rate, the two leading companies use 12Gbps and 13Gbps respectively, and Renxin Technology believes that only by achieving a faster transmission rate can it have a chance to gain a place in the competition with the head enterprises, so the standard of the new product R-LinC has been raised to 16Gbps, creating a precedent in the industry to support higher-specification sensors, displays and other applications in the future.
In terms of process, the common process in the industry is 55nm process, while R-LinC uses the more advanced 22nm process, which provides the process basis for extreme performance.
In addition, the stronger the insertion loss compensation ability of the SerDes chip, the higher the signal transmission quality, while the insertion loss compensation of R-LinC is as high as more than 30dB, which greatly reduces the channel requirements and far exceeds the industry level between 20-30dB.
According to Dang Weiguang, the R-LinC chip has been successfully applied to the intelligent driving 5V super vision solution in cooperation with Sony, conforming to the trend of intelligent driving sensor integration, the solution uses 5 cameras to replace the existing 11 cameras to cover the whole vehicle. From the perspective of a single camera, the resolution of up to 17MP and the large FOV can obtain a wider range of vehicle surrounding information, but it will also consume more bandwidth than the original solution, and from the perspective of the whole system, the number of cameras is reduced at the same time, the amount of data collection is greatly increased, which means that the communication interface bandwidth is required. Under the above requirements, the transmission capacity of R-LinC chips is up to 16Gbps, highlighting the competitiveness of industry-leading products.
Localization value substitution, empowering the domestic automotive industry chain
"Domestic substitution, product substitution is only the first step, the substitution of market position is the essence, which is also the ultimate goal of Renxin Technology. "Weiguang Dang, who has more than 20 years of product and market experience in foreign companies such as Nokia, Qualcomm, and Synopsys, has a deep understanding of the chip industry.
As the core components of automotive electronics, chips are extremely demanding on quality and safety, so customers' requirements for new suppliers are even higher than those of existing suppliers. At the same time, the marketization of chip companies is also extremely challenging, not only need to build product definition capabilities, but also must have comprehensive strength in rapid product iteration, quality control and supply chain coordination.
For this problem, Renxin Technology hopes to implement the company philosophy of "adults reach themselves, reach themselves adults" to empower customers, take into account the requirements of customer technology development and cost reduction, and achieve cost reduction and efficiency increase through continuous iterative upgrading of products. In the words of Dang Weiguang: "Only by creating value for customers can we have value." ”
Focusing on the needs of customers to reduce costs and increase efficiency, Renxin Technology optimizes the existing transmission and interface solutions by endowing SerDes chips with high bandwidth and high integration capabilities to achieve the effect of reducing costs.
In the design of R-LinC chips, Renxin Technology adopts a highly integrated interface solution, which effectively simplifies the network topology and reduces the number of chips, wiring harnesses and connectors. In terms of serial chips, R-LinC achieves the efficient integration of 2-way 1 and 6-way 1 in deserialization chips, which greatly reduces the complexity and cost of the system.
Write at the end
It is foreseeable that under the growing demand for high-end driving assistance and intelligent cockpit user experience, the on-board SerDes chip, which solves the pain points of high-speed data transmission in the car, will surely usher in a broader market prospect. As an excellent domestic supplier in this field, Renxin Technology will continue to adhere to the innovation strategy of "high speed, stability and cost performance", and contribute a solid force to the domestic substitution of automotive SerDes.
At the end of the interview, Dang Weiguang emphasized that Renxin Technology can not only provide chip products, but also provide a series of turnkey services including software and hardware, system solution design and application, so as to ensure the on-time delivery of customer products. At the same time, Renxin Technology hopes to establish in-depth cooperation with more leading enterprises in ecology to empower the independent and controllable domestic chip supply chain.