Intelligent driving drives rapid growth of automotive semiconductors

In an environment where the overall performance of the global semiconductor market is unsatisfactory, the automotive electronics market has become one of the few segments with outstanding performance and high expectations. Among them, electrification and intelligence are driving the rapid expansion of the automotive semiconductor market. The global automotive semiconductor market will reach US$46.7 billion in 2021 , a year-on-year net increase of 33%, more than double the 14.5% growth rate of the entire semiconductor industry. Even in 2022, when semiconductors perform poorly, the automotive semiconductor market will continue to maintain double-digit growth. , reaching US$54.8 billion. Under the general trend of electrification and intelligence, the demand for automotive semiconductor applications will continue to grow rapidly in the next few years. According to Omdia's forecast, the global automotive semiconductor market will exceed US$80 billion in 2025, with a CAGR of 15% from 2021 to 25.

Automotive smart terminals will become the nerve endings of the smart era. Automotive chips are the core that help cars enter the smart era. Large computing power and precise perception are the basic requirements for automobile intelligence. This will drive everything from core chips with large computing power to various sensors. and the rapid development of semiconductor devices such as radar. Compared with the relatively simple assisted driving in the early days and the L5 level autonomous driving that currently only exists in an ideal state, various intelligent driving and ADAS systems have begun to become widely popular in various types of vehicles. It is predicted that the penetration rate of L1/L2 autonomous driving will reach 50% in 2025, and the current penetration rate is only 35%, while the penetration rate of L3 autonomous driving will rapidly increase from 5% in 2020 to 2035. 45%, L4 and above level autonomous driving will also grow from less than 1% now to about 22% in 2035. QY Research predicts that the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of the global intelligent driving -related chip market will exceed 20% from 2021 to 2028. The increase in demand for electric vehicles and the popularization of autonomous driving technology are the main factors driving its market growth. Additionally, the growing demand for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) is expected to drive market growth.

Intelligent driving changes the automotive semiconductor landscape

By 2025, the penetration rate of high-level autonomous driving will reach 65.5%, and the market demand for intelligent driving chips will reach 14 million units per year. So which specific categories of chips will benefit from the rapid popularization of autonomous driving technology?

MCU is the most widely used digital chip in automobiles. Traditional automobiles and bicycles use an average of 70 MCUs, while cars equipped with intelligent driving functions may use more than 300. Application areas include ADAS, body, chassis, safety, and information. Entertainment, powertrain, etc., almost everywhere. Therefore, the market size of automotive MCUs is expected to reach nearly US$12 billion by 2025, corresponding to a compound average growth rate of 14.1% from 2021 to 2025. This compound growth rate is significantly higher than the overall MCU market growth rate of 8% in the next three years. .

The trend of automobile intelligence has brought about several orders of magnitude improvement in the intelligent architecture and algorithm computing power of automobiles, pushing automobile chips to quickly shift to equipped with SoC chips with stronger computing power. The biggest driving force comes from the development of smart cockpit technology. Rapidly popularizing, due to the increasing demand for "one core, multiple screens", smart cockpit chips need to support both infotainment functions and various dashboard display functions, and must gradually develop in the direction of miniaturization, integration, and high performance. As the most intuitive unit to enhance the driving experience, smart cockpits have become another core competitive advantage of new energy vehicles compared with traditional fuel vehicles. According to IHS statistics, the penetration rate of new smart cockpit cars in the global market and the Chinese market is increasing year by year. It is expected that by 2025 will increase to 59.4% and 75.9% respectively.

Autonomous driving chips become the brightest star

Autonomous driving chips are the fastest-growing field in smart car chips. Consumers are in urgent need of L3 and above autonomous driving functions, and some countries have opened L3/L4 autonomous driving functions in closed and semi-closed areas. and test applications in low-speed scenarios, high-computing power autonomous driving chips will inevitably usher in a broader market space than before. The computing power required by current cars can be calculated based on the amount of data collected by sensors in the car. L2 level autonomous driving requires roughly 10 TOPS of computing power. Data shows that L3 level autonomous driving requires 80-100 TOPS of computing power. L4 level requires more than 600TOPS, and L5 level requires more than 2000TOPS. It is expected that autonomous vehicles will begin a period of explosive growth around 2025. The compound growth rate of the autonomous driving chip market with large computing power will be no less than 30% between 2023 and 2030, and will gradually become a major player in automotive semiconductors. The chip product with the most economic value. From the perspective of the overall development trend of autonomous driving, since the sensor information that needs to be processed requires a large amount of redundancy, autonomous driving has extremely high requirements for terminal computing power. At the same time, it also puts forward higher requirements for the real-time performance, energy efficiency and reliability of terminal computing. Comprehensive It seems that dedicated chips will become the mainstream solution for autonomous driving processor chips in the future.

Intelligent driving is inseparable from the application of massive sensors

The core of intelligent driving is the collection and processing of various types of information inside and outside the car. Burgess Consulting predicts that by 2027, the global automotive sensor market will reach 324.376 billion yuan with a CAGR of 13.97%. In particular, various sensor systems that can better serve intelligent driving will become the main force leading the rapid development of the automotive sensor market.

As the requirements for accurate detection, identification, transmission, and analysis of environmental information around the vehicle body become higher and higher, the importance of laser radar has gradually become more prominent. Lidar is one of the important configurations of mid-to-high-end smart driving vehicles. According to Yole data, global lidar shipments in the ADAS market will grow from 200,000 units in 2020 to 3.4 million units in 2025, with a CAGR of 76.2%; it is expected to Shipments will reach 26.6 million units in 2032.

Vehicle-mounted CIS is the core sensor of ADAS, which can make up for the shortcomings of radar in object recognition. It is also the sensor closest to human vision and is widely used in the automotive field. CIS has been used in scenes such as driving records, reversing images, and parking surround views in the early days. It is gradually extending to behavior recognition in smart cockpits and ADAS assisted driving, and its application potential is beginning to become prominent. Due to the addition of autonomous driving functions, the demand for automotive cameras will increase rapidly, and the corresponding demand for CIS will also increase significantly. If L3 and above-level autonomous driving can be implemented in 2023, the number of bicycle cameras is expected to increase to about 11 to 16 eyes. In this way, the demand for cameras may be around 1.6 billion at most, and the market size may reach 8 billion to 10 billion US dollars.

There is no doubt that the rapid application of intelligent driving has become an irreversible development trend in the automotive industry, which will profoundly change the supply pattern and future development direction of traditional automotive semiconductors. So how to seize the latest development trend of the automotive electronics market and grasp the future opportunities of automotive semiconductor design and application?