Up to now, automotive chips are still in short supply, and the shortage of materials has been extended from conventional automotive chips to incremental electric vehicle chips such as IGBT; While the industry chain has made greater efforts to solve the shortage of automotive chips, some enterprises have been planning more advanced vehicle scale chips, such as chip engine technology, NXP, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, etc., and have successively released 7Nm and 5nm process chips. So, has the development of automotive chips to advanced process technology become the mainstream?
In this regard, industry insiders say that safety, stability and reliability are the biggest demands of vehicle specification chips. There are many types of vehicle chips, and not all chips are suitable for advanced processes. For performance, power consumption and cost considerations, new generation chips such as AI computing units prefer to adopt advanced process technologies. Dr. Wang Kai, director and CEO of chip engine technology, further pointed out that chips with advanced technology can also reserve space for future OTA and other iterative upgrades.
TSMC is still the core of the car
A few days ago, hexiaopeng, the founder of Xiaopeng automobile, said in a document that a smart car needs hundreds of kinds and more than 5000 chips, but there are still many proprietary chips in short supply. The author learned from the supply chain that IGBT is currently in short supply, and the delivery cycle of some materials has been extended to more than 50 weeks. According to auto forecast solutions, a data forecasting company in the automotive industry, due to the dual impact of chip shortage and epidemic, as of mid May, the global auto production has been reduced by 1.72 million this year.
While the industry chain is trying to solve the problem of chip shortage, some enterprises are actively laying out the next generation of advanced process Automotive chips.
On May 24, NXP announced that it would use TSMC's 5nm process to build a new generation of S32 series automotive processors, which would be imported into Honghua advanced technology model C, a joint venture between Hon Hai and Yulong. At the same time, Kurt sievers, President and CEO of NXP, announced that it had cooperated with TSMC to develop a system on chip (SOC) with 5nm ASIL D security level.
The author also found that this is not the first time in the industry to use advanced process technology to build automotive chips. At the end of 2021, Qualcomm released the world's first 5nm automotive chip, 8295. Based on this chip, Qualcomm launched the fourth generation snapdragon automotive digital cockpit platform, and will be the first to be built on the Jidu automobile in 2023.
In addition, anba's cv5 chip with intelligent cockpit as the main battlefield and NVIDIA's next generation intelligent driving chip Atlan will also adopt 5nm process technology.
Compared with 5nm, 7Nm automotive chips are more, and some products have been mass produced or even loaded. For example, the Orin of NVIDIA, the representative of 7Nm high computing power chip, has been officially announced for mass production at the end of March this year. Once launched, the chip has been selected by a large number of OEMs such as BYD, ideal, Jidu, Mercedes Benz, Zhiji, Jaguar Land Rover, Volvo, Hyundai, Audi, and lutes, and has been built on the velai et 7 model for the first time.
Among other chips, core engine technology "dragon Eagle 1", horizon journey 6, Mobileye's eyeq5/eyeq6, Cambrian flag Xiage technology high-level intelligent driving chip (not released), Tesla FSD chip, and Xilinx versal AI edge series also adopt 7Nm process technology.
List of global advanced process Automotive chips (public data sorting)
According to the statistical results, the current 5nm process chips are still in the development or release state, and have not entered the mass production stage; However, among the 7Nm chips, orin, FSD, eyeq5, 8155 and other chips have achieved mass production. The "longying-1" of chip engine technology is also about to be mass produced. Other chips will be mass produced in the next few years, which indicates that advanced process Automotive chips have begun to enter the acceleration period of mass production.
At the same time, TSMC and Samsung, the two foundries that have mastered the cutting-edge advanced wafer manufacturing process, will benefit from it. In particular, TSMC has adopted or planned to manufacture 11 of the 14 chips counted, and only a few enterprises such as anba and Tesla choose Samsung.
It should be noted that AMBA and Tesla have basically the same reasons for choosing Samsung. First, Samsung has sufficient production capacity, and second, the cost is relatively low compared with TSMC. However, recently, anba pointed out in a sharp drop in its share price that there was a problem with its 14nm OEM production line, which made the market worried that the impact would affect CV series products.
Advanced manufacturing process has become a "core" trend
The author notes that at present, all the chips with advanced process technology are automotive AI chips. Industry insiders said that safety, stability and reliability are the biggest demands of vehicle specification chips. There are many types of vehicle chips, and not all chips are suitable for advanced manufacturing processes. A few days ago, hexiaopeng also pointed out that most of the chips in short supply are cheap chips, not expensive advanced chips.
Among them, MCU is one of the common automotive chips. This kind of chip does not need very advanced process technology. It can meet the demand at 28-40nm. Compared with advanced technology, there are many enterprises that can provide MCU OEM in the world. Internationally, the main MCU suppliers such as St, NXP, and Renesas adopt TSMC OEM. Domestic SMIC international mainly OEM to enterprises such as Zhaoyi innovation and Xinhai Technology. Huahong is also one of the MCU OEM enterprises of Zhaoyi innovation.
However, due to the fact that traditional automotive chips mostly use mature processes, compared with advanced processes, the profit margin is small. Some insiders said that the low value and high threshold are the important reasons for the great contrast between the enthusiasm of industrial chain enterprises and the market in the current round of automotive chip shortage. TSMC's financial report shows that in 2020, the revenue of its automotive chip business accounted for only 3% of its total revenue; In 2021, against the background of the global shortage of automotive chips, the proportion of TSMC's automotive chips' revenue was only increased to 4%, while mobile phones, computers and other business areas using advanced process technology have always been their main source of revenue.
Some insiders said that due to the tight capacity of mature process technology, in order to speed up the mass production of chips, they had to avoid the mature process and choose 22nm and other manufacturing processes with relatively abundant capacity.
However, with the development of automobile intelligence, traditional chips such as MCU can no longer meet the market demand. The above-mentioned people also believe that with the increasing abundance of automobile functions, more and more functions to be processed, and the demand for centralized control, the market has a growing demand for powerful chips, especially in the fields of automatic driving and intelligent cockpit, they prefer to adopt advanced process technology for performance and power consumption.
Another industry insider pointed out that at present, most manufacturers are concerned about and research and development of automotive high-power chips, rather than automotive chips in the traditional sense. With the gradual upgrading of automotive electronic and electrical architecture, the number and value of chips carried in each vehicle are increasing, and the requirements for computing power and performance of core chips are becoming higher and higher. The chips provided by traditional automotive chip suppliers are becoming more and more difficult to meet the requirements of OEMs for product iteration speed, cost and performance. Among them, Dr. Wang Kai, for example, believes that the deep integration of software and hardware has become the development direction of future vehicles, and OTA upgrading and other functions will also be more and more applied. Core engine technology uses 7Nm advanced process technology, which also reserves sufficient upgrading space for future vehicle system upgrading.
According to McKinsey's prediction, by 2025, the value of L1 single car AI SOC chips will be $69, L2 $190, L3 $685.9 and l4/l5 $1487.9 respectively. Based on this analysis, McKinsey believes that the global market scale of automotive AI SOC chips will be US $16billion in 2025, of which the Chinese market will be US $5.52 billion; By 2030, the global market scale of automotive AI SOC chips will reach US $30.34 billion, including US $10.46 billion in China.
Intel, which has made in-depth layout in the field of vehicle specification chips, also holds the same view. It believes that at present, the proportion of chips in the bill of materials of high-end automobiles is about 4%. It is expected that the proportion of chips will increase to more than 20% by 2030.
Based on the increasing demand for new generation chips in automobiles, the industry is accelerating the research and development of chips with stronger performance, and advanced manufacturing processes are increasingly becoming one of the important chips to meet the future automotive applications.
Looking back to the domestic market, the author found that, compared with international enterprises, there are not many local enterprises with advanced manufacturing processes and high computing power chips. Chip engine technology and horizon are outstanding representatives of local enterprises. Dr. Wang Kai pointed out that the high threshold of automotive chips, the shortage of domestic talents and the incomplete industrial support will still be major challenges faced by local automotive chip enterprises.
However, with the active efforts of many enterprises, local advanced process chips and high computing power chips have also entered the harvest period. Yangyuxin, CMO of black sesame intelligence, said in an interview with jiwei.com, "2022 will be the year of mass production of domestic high computing power vehicle chips."
(checked by /james)