Huawei invested in 7 semiconductor companies, and it's really working hard for the automotive industry

Huawei has invested in seven semiconductor companies under the name of Hubble Technology Investment Co., Ltd. If you look closely at these seven companies, you will find that their products are all related to automotive electronics. Huawei is not just talking about entering the automotive industry.

What do the 7 have in common

The seven companies invested by Huawei are: Shandong Tianyue, Jiehuate, Yutai Autocom, Deep Thinking, Kunyou Optoelectronics, Haoda Electronics and Qinghong Electronics.

Shandong Tianyue is a semiconductor crystal and substrate material R&D and manufacturing company that integrates the R&D, design, manufacturing and sales of various semiconductor crystals and substrate materials, and focuses on high-tech products of third-generation semiconductor silicon carbide materials. Shandong Tianyue's silicon carbide products mainly include 4H-conductive silicon carbide substrate materials, with specifications of 2 inches, 3 inches, 4 inches and 6 inches. In the future, they can be widely used in high-power high-frequency electronic devices, semiconductor light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and microwave communications such as 5G communications and logistics networks. The application prospects of silicon carbide materials in electric vehicles are very broad.

Jewatt is committed to the research of power management chips, providing systematic solutions and product services for users in industries such as power, communications, and electric vehicles. Currently, Jewatt has products such as battery management, LED lighting, and DC/DC converters.

Yutai Chetong was established on January 25, 2017 and officially started operations on June 1 of the same year. It is a core automotive communication chip developer dedicated to the design, development and sales of wired communication PHY chips. In the field of automotive Ethernet PHY chips, Yutai Chetong has successfully developed the first PHY chip "YT8010" in China that meets the 100Base-T1 standard and has entered the mass production stage, breaking the monopoly of international chip giants in this chip field.

Deepwise AI is an AI company that focuses on brain-like AI and deep learning core technologies. Its most prominent technology is the "multimodal deep semantic understanding engine (iDeepwise.ai) technology", which can simultaneously understand the deep semantics behind multimodal unstructured data such as text and visual images. Its technology is mainly applied in application scenarios such as smart cars, smart phones, smart homes, and smart healthcare, and is being continuously expanded and implemented on a large scale.

Kunyou Optoelectronics focuses on the research and development and application of wafer-level optical chips, and is committed to exploring the integration of semiconductor technology and optical technology, and designing and manufacturing nano-scale, low-cost optical chips with semiconductor wafer ideas. The company's wafer-level optics is a cornerstone field of consumer photonics, which can improve the accuracy of optics by an order of magnitude while reducing the cost by an order of magnitude, thereby making many emerging needs and commercial values ​​possible, including 3D depth imaging and unmanned driving, AR/MR display, short-distance all-optical transmission between chips, medical imaging, aviation and military industry, automated security, etc.

Haoda Electronics was founded in 1999 and is a well-known surface acoustic wave device manufacturer. It has a production line that can produce 0.25um micro-line chips and a production line that can produce CSP flip-chip product packaging. It can produce products with a size of 1.8*1.4 duplexers and 1.1*0.9 filters. The product application field includes the Internet of Vehicles.

The latest investment is Qinghong Electronics, a connector manufacturer that integrates product development, production and sales. Its main products are industrial connectors and consumer electronics connectors. Various connectors are indispensable in automotive electronics.

From this perspective, although the products of these seven companies are different, they all have the attributes of automotive electronics.

Multi-party layout

Since the beginning of 2019, Huawei has been increasingly vocal in the automotive sector.

In an interview with CCTV at the beginning of the year, Ren Zhengfei mentioned the automotive industry for the first time. He had a clear attitude and said that Huawei would never cross over to build cars, but would focus on using its own technology to improve the car networking and autonomous driving capabilities.

At the "5th International Automotive Key Technology Forum", Huawei's rotating chairman Xu Zhijun also believed that "with the deep integration of the automotive industry and the ICT industry, smart connected electric vehicles are becoming a new revolutionary development engine for human society, and its impact goes far beyond the two industries themselves."

He also formally elaborated on Huawei's strategic choice at the meeting, namely "Huawei will not build cars, but will focus on ICT technology to help car companies build better cars."

Huawei's entry into the automotive field is surprising. This is already a trend in today's technology industry. From Apple to Google, technology giants have long been eyeing this huge industry.

Huawei started its automotive layout very early. In 2013, when electric cars were gaining popularity, Huawei announced the launch of the vehicle-mounted module ME909T, entered the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), and established the "IoV Business Department".

Since 2014, Huawei has teamed up with Dongfeng Motor to develop the Internet of Vehicles, and established cooperative relationships with GAC, SAIC, FAW, etc., and cooperated in many fields, including the Internet of Vehicles, smart cars, and international business expansion.

In 2016, Huawei, Audi, BMW, Daimler, Ericsson, Intel, Nokia and Qualcomm jointly announced the establishment of the "5G Automotive Alliance", aiming to integrate the resources of the giants, accelerate the research and development of driverless cars, and deploy the interconnected equipment needed in the research and development process.

In November 2018, Huawei and Shanghai GM-Wuling signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement, proposing to rely on its own technological advantages in industrial Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data, 5G, etc. to help partners achieve intelligent network transformation.

According to media reports, since Huawei announced its entry into the Internet of Vehicles in 2013, its Internet of Vehicles Innovation Center under the Huawei Central Research Institute has begun recruiting talents in the fields of intelligent driving, power battery system development and design, motors and electric drives, charging solutions, and vehicle design.

At present, Huawei's Internet of Vehicles Division has a team of thousands of people. The main research and development focus of the entire division is the core power system of future electric vehicles. At the same time, Huawei also has a team specializing in battery and energy research, namely the Watt Laboratory.

In 2019, the Financial Times reported that Huawei was working with automakers in Europe, Japan and China and planned to launch self-driving cars as early as 2021.

In the latest report, Huawei's current rotating chairman Xu Zhijun said that Huawei will use its 5G technology to develop autonomous driving radar.

In connection with these invested companies, it can be seen that Huawei is playing a big game in the field of automotive electronics.

Breaking down barriers

The opportunities brought by automotive electronics give technology companies a lot of room for imagination. From AI chips to vehicle systems, from new energy batteries to 5G car networking, from image and voice intelligent recognition technology to high-precision 3D maps, each one is a huge blue ocean market.

For Huawei, except for a few special areas, Huawei already has most of the technologies, and the rest is to integrate them. At a time when the US pressure is getting heavier and the terminal market is approaching saturation, entering the automotive field is a very reasonable choice.

However, why doesn't Huawei build cars directly? Huawei has given its own answer to this. Xu Zhijun once said that as cars continue to evolve into "smart cars", the value structure of cars is also undergoing profound changes. For example, electronic components, software, and services will occupy an increasingly large share in the automotive value system. From this perspective, it doesn't make much sense for Huawei to invest a lot of resources in making things at the body, chassis, and other levels. Simply put, in future cars, the digital level will account for an increasingly large proportion of BOM costs and selling prices. This can also explain to a certain extent why Huawei defines itself as an "incremental" parts supplier, and the word "incremental" is particularly important.

However, if Huawei wants to play the automotive chess game well, it cannot do without the close cooperation with industry partners, including close cooperation with core component suppliers in the fields of chassis, steering, braking, etc., and work with OEMs to do a good job in system integration and terminal applications. To help enterprises build good cars, Huawei still has a long way to go.