Semiconductor Industry Research: One article to help you understand automotive-grade chips

• Automotive grade chip certification standards

  
  

Automotive-grade chips need to pass AEC-Q testing. Different semiconductor devices pass different test types, and different uses require different levels of testing.

• Growth of the automotive-grade chip market

The increase in the scale of the car-grade chip market is mainly due to the increase in the penetration rate of the new energy vehicle market, which has promoted the growth of the total demand for car-grade chips, and the intelligentization of automobiles has promoted the growth in the demand for bicycle chips.

• Examples of automotive grade chip functions

The car-grade chips required for new energy motors, batteries, and electronic control "three-power systems" are unique to new energy vehicles. Other functions such as entertainment, body systems, and information networking are in demand in both traditional fuel vehicles and new energy vehicles; intelligent Driving functions are an automotive application that has developed rapidly in recent years. Therefore, compared with traditional fuel vehicles in the past, new energy "three-electric systems" and intelligent driving functions have greater demand for automotive-grade chips.

• Global automotive grade chip supply situation 2022-2024
  

Starting from 2020, affected by factors such as mismatch between production and demand and demand for consumer electronics that squeezes production capacity, the production capacity of automotive-grade chips has gradually become tight, and the average product delivery cycle has lengthened from 6-9 weeks to about 26 weeks; supply of automotive-grade chips in 2023 It has gradually recovered, and in the second half of 2023, there will be high inventory of automotive-grade chips and customers will tighten chip purchase orders; however, in terms of demand structure, high-end MCUs and IGBTs are still in short supply.

• Car-grade chip "onboard" process

Generally speaking, it takes about 3.5-5.5 years from design to mass production of car-grade chips, and it is expected to continue to be supplied in batches for 5-10 years after being put on the car.

• Demand for wafer manufacturing processes for automotive-grade chips

Among domestic automotive-grade chips, MCU, CIS, display driver IC, MEMS sensors, etc. mainly use mature processes (above 28nm), which have a high degree of overlap with the processes used in consumer electronics and other products; AI chips, SoCs, and GPUs mainly use advanced processes Process (below 28nm)

• Schematic diagram of automotive grade chip industry

Breakthroughs have been made in the localization of automotive-grade chips, especially in the fields of power semiconductors, computing chips, and control chips, which have a certain market share.

• The main suppliers of automotive grade MCU chips are foreign manufacturers, and domestic manufacturers have achieved batch shipments

According to Omdia data, my country's MCU market size will be approximately US$8.34 billion in 2022, of which the market size of complex instruction set MCUs will be approximately US$2 billion; domestic manufacturers mainly include Xinwang Micro, BYD Semiconductor, Jiefa Technology, etc., and foreign competitors mainly Including Renesas, NXP, Infineon, etc.

Smart cockpit chips in automotive-grade SoC chips are already supplied by domestic manufacturers, but the main suppliers are still foreign manufacturers. Especially in the car market with a unit price of more than 400,000 yuan, Nvidia, Intel, and Qualcomm occupy a large share.

In the field of automotive-grade SoC autonomous driving chips, domestic manufacturers have achieved certain sales, but Nvidia still holds more than 80% of the market share.

Among automotive-grade sensor chips, domestic manufacturers are mainly concentrated in the body sensor market such as humidity, temperature, photosensitivity, and pressure, while radar sensors are still dominated by foreign manufacturers.

• Domestic companies have achieved mass supply of automotive-grade power chips

my country has achieved mass supply of automotive-grade power chips. Major companies include Star Semiconductor, Times Electric, BYD Semiconductor, Silan Micro, etc.