Another new chip force enters the automotive field

Aixin Yuanzhi, a new chip force, has entered the automotive field. According to official news, Aixin will implement the front-end installation of the core chip of the intelligent driving system in two vehicles this year.

Judging from the scale of shipments, this should be the third domestic chip company to achieve large-scale shipments of in-vehicle intelligent driving systems after Horizon and Black Sesame Intelligence .

At the GIV Global Intelligent Vehicle Industry Conference held not long ago, HiEV chatted with Qiu Xiaoxin, CEO of Aixin Yuanzhi.

Aixin Yuanzhi was established in 2019, and its initial products were positioned in the fields of smart cities and smart transportation. In 2021, the company hopes to enter the automotive field and complete the vehicle regulatory verification of the first chip in 2022. At the end of May this year, its automotive smart driving chip M55 will achieve pre-installation mass production.

The background of Qiu Xiaoxin, CEO of Aixin Yuanzhi, was that he worked in mobile phone chips at Broadcom for more than ten years. She believes that compared with advanced chips on the cloud and server sides, the gap in strength between Chinese manufacturers and international manufacturers in edge-side and terminal-side chips is not that big.

On the contrary, domestic manufacturers are likely to occupy more than 50% of the automotive chip market, especially smart driving chips, within three years.

Why did a chip company cross over into automotive?

According to data shared by Qiu Xiaoxin on GIV, the size of the chip market for smart cities is approximately US$2.5 billion, and the size of automotive smart driving chips is US$10 billion.

Therefore, in-vehicle smart driving chips have a more considerable market size.

Aixin Yuanzhi will start planning the vehicle business in 2021. Qiu believes that in terms of underlying technology, the needs of vehicles and smart cities are relatively consistent: the perception of autonomous driving is based on vision, and strong needs are concentrated in image processing, multi- sensor fusion and computing. The technology is highly reusable, such as AI  ISP and NPU technology.

Therefore, based on previous technology accumulation, an autonomous driving chip will soon be developed.

Aixin has matured shipments in the smart city field before and has rich experience in supply chain delivery and quality. In the past two years, an in-vehicle team has been built internally to provide personal service to in-vehicle customers.

At present, Aixin Yuanzhi has laid out low, medium and high series of smart driving chip product lines:

M55, a low-end entry-level chip with 8 Tops computing power, is mainly used in front-view all-in-one computer applications;

M76, with a medium computing power level and a computing power of 60 Tops on a single chip, is used as an all-in-one parking and small domain control product. This product will pass the vehicle regulations in January or February next year and enter the stage of large-scale mass production and introduction. ;

At the beginning of this year, the third chip design was started internally, which can support higher-level autonomous driving capabilities such as 11V sensing solution and support the implementation of urban NOA functions. It is expected to be tape-out next year and energy production in 2025;

Next year, the design of a higher-end M9 chip will also begin.

In the past two years, due to the fierce competition in the new energy vehicle market, the cost control of parts and components in the automotive field has been very strict.

Aixin believes that it belongs to a special category among chip companies and is one of the few chip companies that spans smart city + smart driving. Because smart city shipments are large, supply chain costs can be reduced; IP R&D costs have been amortized, the success rate of R&D will be higher, and supply chain costs will be lower. This logic is similar to Qualcomm’s cost advantage in entering the automotive field from the mobile phone field.

At present, the two cars on Aixin Yuanzhi are also positioned as cost-effective.

Next year: Domestic manufacturers compete in the mid-range computing chip market

Aixin Yuanzhi’s important goal next year is to enter the mainstream car market priced at RMB 100,000-200,000 with the M76 product, hoping to be installed on models priced under RMB 150,000, “to popularize high-end smart driving to RMB 150,000.” Within".

In the market with medium computing power, it is foreseeable that the competition next year will be very fierce. Chip products in this range also include: TI's TDA4 VH, Nvidia's Orin N, Black Sesame's A1000, and Horizon's Journey 5 and Journey 6 entry-level products.

Compared with products on the market, Aixin believes that the core advantages of M76 are:

The computing power utilization is very high, and the NPU supports transformer and BEV;

Low power consumption, domain controllers that support high-speed NOA can use passive cooling, and the cost is relatively lower;

Thanks to the large-scale shipments of smart cities, costs are controllable and cost-effective;

Currently, in order to plan for mass production next year, Aixin has cooperated with several Tier 1s to introduce software algorithms. Qiu believes that domestic chip companies can take a dominant position in the smart driving market in about three years.

Firstly, due to domestic policy guidelines, semiconductors must be autonomous and controllable, and domestic car companies dare to use domestic chips; secondly, edge and vehicle-mounted devices are different from cloud and server. In the cloud, overseas manufacturers have a strong ecosystem, and edge A hundred flowers bloom on the side and end sides, and China is not lagging behind on the edge side and end side; thirdly, Chinese companies can roll out, and Chinese companies provide personal services to car companies, which is difficult for foreign manufacturers to do.

This year, mainstream car companies such as BYD , Geely, and Changan have begun to widely adopt high-end smart driving solutions. The popularization of high-end smart driving into the mass market is also a gold-rush opportunity for domestic chip manufacturers.