Chinese startups achieve breakthrough in automotive IC field

According to DIGITIMES, industry insiders revealed that Chinese start-ups have played an important role in developing automotive ICs for applications such as smart cockpits, ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems) and autonomous driving, but are expected to face huge competitive challenges in the next five years.

It is reported that in December 2021, it will take the lead in launching the SE1000 smart cockpit multimedia SoC based on 7nm process, which is a benchmark product for Qualcomm SA8155P and will start mass production in the second half of 2022.

At present, CoreEngine has completed the testing of SE1000 and has obtained the opportunity for Geely Automobile to adopt this SoC in its new models. In addition, CoreEngine has also cooperated with China Desay Group, ArcherMind Technology, Juefei Technology, Haiwei Technology and others to promote the application of SE1000.

JieFa Technology has also been committed to the development of smart cockpit SoCs and released the fifth-generation model AC8025, which optimizes the output of video and combines a DSP (digital signal processing)-based audio solution.

According to data from ICV Tank in Hong Kong, China, the value of China's smart cockpit market will grow to 107.2 billion yuan (US$15.9 billion) in 2025, 2.14 times that of 2020.

The report pointed out that Horizon Robotics, Cambricon, CoreDrive Technology and Black Sesame are all focused on in-vehicle ICs for autonomous driving.

Among them, Horizon is the first company to start mass production of in-vehicle high-performance computing ICs for automakers, and is technically capable of providing autonomous driving IC solutions for L2 to L4. "Journey 5" is a series of artificial intelligence inference processors developed by Horizon, which has been adopted by Chinese automakers such as BYD.

Cambricon plans to launch L2 autonomous driving IC and L4 autonomous driving IC in 2022-2023, while Xinchi Technology will launch an intelligent driving SoC with a computing power of 200TOPS (trillion operations per second) in the fourth quarter of 2022.

In addition, Heizhima has launched the "Huashan No. 2 A1000", which is the only IC among domestic IC design companies that supports L3 and above autonomous driving.