After shipping 3 million pieces, the "Little Qualcomm" in the smart cabin industry has emerged

At the 2024 Beijing Auto Show, local chip companies began to intercept foreign suppliers.

For a long time, the automotive industry has looked to NVIDIA for smart driving chips and Qualcomm for cockpit chips. NVIDIA's Orin series is very popular, Qualcomm's 8155 has swept the mainstream smart cars, and 8295 is regarded as the strongest configuration.

However, China's automotive industry chain cannot be underestimated.

At this auto show, Horizon Robotics launched the Journey 6 family of intelligent driving chips to compete with Nvidia, and CoreDrive Technology released the cockpit chip X9CC to compete with Qualcomm. "CoreDrive is like a small Infineon + a small Qualcomm." Chen Shujie, vice president of CoreDrive Technology, said that the small Qualcomm means that the two companies can compete with each other in the field of cockpit chips.

Before X9CC, CoreDrive's cockpit chips had shipped 3 million units. The NPU computing power of the X9CC launched this time is three to five times higher than that of the previous generation of chips, and is comparable to the parameters of Qualcomm 8295.

Today, let’s analyze how the “Little Qualcomm” in the Chinese automotive industry has raised its products to a level that can compete with the king of cockpit chips.

1. 3 million units installed in vehicles, with a broad cockpit product line

In order to become China's "Little Qualcomm", Xinchi Technology did not adopt a complete follower strategy.

During the mass production of Qualcomm cockpit chips, three generations of products were launched, from the earliest 820A to 8155 and 8295. The products are few but fine, and they have become the benchmark products of cockpit chips.

However, Qualcomm's cockpit chip products have more consumer electronics attributes and a more aggressive strategy, tending to drive customers to use its latest products. This process earns car manufacturers a lot of attention, but it also means a lot of R&D costs.

In contrast, Xinchi Technology has established a very broad product line in the field of automotive chips, including cockpit, intelligent driving, gateway and vehicle control.

Among them, cockpit chips have the largest shipment volume and the broadest product line. According to data released by Xinchi Technology, it has shipped more than 4.5 million pieces to date, including more than 3 million cockpit chips and more than 1.5 million vehicle control MCUs.

Among cockpit chips, the X9 series ranges from the 10KDMIPS dual-core to the 200KDMIPS X9CC, and products include X9E, X9M, X9H, X9HP, and X9SP.

These products cover entry-level to flagship-level cockpit application scenarios, including instruments, IVI, cockpit domain control, and cabin-parking integration. The OEMs that have mass-produced them include Chery, SAIC, Changan, GAC, BAIC, Dongfeng Nissan, Dongfeng Honda, etc., with more than 40 mass-produced models and more than 200 mass-produced designated projects.

Chen Shujie said, "We hope that our products can cover many basic needs in cars with one platform."

The X9CC released at the Beijing Auto Show is the latest product in the X9 cockpit chip series, with a CPU computing power of 200KDMIPS and an NPU computing power of 40TOPS.

Among the cockpit chips that have been mass-produced, the most powerful Qualcomm 8295 has a CPU computing power of 230K DMIPS and an NPU computing power of 30TOPS. In other words, the performance of X9CC is basically at the same level as Qualcomm's strongest products.

As a local chip supplier, Xinchi Technology has more cards in its hand than just product performance.

"We hope to provide car manufacturers with a stable and reliable solution with better cost, lower development cost and low mass production risk in the X9 series of products," said Sun Mingle, CTO of CoreDrive Technology.

Benchmarking Infineon, Xinchi Technology mainly made layout from the MCU product dimension:

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• The first is the regional controller. The current products include E3118 and 3119 released in March. They are expected to reach mass production in September this year. The latest flagship chip E3650 was released at this auto show.

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• Second, for ADAS, the E3100 and E3400 series products have been mass-produced and installed in vehicles;

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• Third, in terms of electric transmission and chassis, the E3100, E3400 and E3600 series have all been put into mass production.

In the future, the E3600 and 3800 series will target higher-integrated power systems and regional control applications.

The E3650 released at the auto show uses the ARM Cortex R52+ high-performance lock-step multi-core cluster, which greatly improves real-time and safety performance and supports virtualization. It integrates up to 16MB of embedded non-volatile memory on the chip, has large-capacity SRAM and richer peripheral resources.

From the perspective of product architecture, the E3650 is designed to meet the cross-domain integration trend of electronic and electrical architecture, and compete with Infineon's AURIX TC4x series and Renesas' RH850 U2A/B series MCUs.

2. Behind the Evolution of Semi-Drive Products: EE Architecture Moves Towards Centralization

Compared with other domestic chip companies, Xinchi Technology's cockpit chip starts with a 16nm process technology, and its MCU starts with a 22nm process technology, which is a higher starting point than domestic chip manufacturers.

In addition, what enables Xinchi Technology to compete with Qualcomm and Infineon is that it has launched sufficiently powerful chip products. The reason behind the launch of these chip products is that Xinchi Technology has hit the right rhythm of the evolution of automotive electronic and electrical architecture.

In 2024, the EE architecture of automobiles will enter the "central computing + regional control" stage. It is not only a selling point for new car manufacturers such as Tesla, Wei, Xiaoli, and Li Auto, but also a new architecture that traditional car brands such as Volkswagen are vying to adopt.

The "central computing + regional control" architecture has greatly improved the software function development cycle, OTA iteration speed, driving safety, etc. It has certain requirements for cockpit chips and automotive MCUs.

In terms of cockpit chips, "central computing" requires the performance of cockpit chips to be improved. This not only refers to the improvement of computing power. Since the traditional CNN algorithm is evolving towards the Transformer large model, more emphasis will be placed on the AI ​​performance of cockpit chips.

In terms of automotive-grade MCUs, "regional control" will face cross-domain integration, and there will be certain requirements for the processing power and security of the MCU. In addition, support for virtualization will be required.

CoreDrive Technology launched X9CC and E3650. The former is a central computing processor that can run up to 6 operating systems on a single chip, including entertainment systems, LCD instruments, central gateways, smart driving, smart cockpits and information security.

The latter, as an automotive-grade MCU product, can be used as a control-fusion regional controller for "body + chassis + power", which will help OEMs achieve a highly integrated and wide-configuration EE architecture.

Xinchi Technology's strategy is very clear. First, it complements international giants such as Qualcomm from the perspective of supply chain flexibility and security. Second, it does not blindly follow the trend of computing power, but provides corresponding cockpit chip products in the automotive market that is not covered by Qualcomm's chip computing power, such as models below 150,000 yuan.

Chen Shujie mentioned, "About three or four years ago, when everyone was scrambling for AI computing power, CoreChi did not follow suit. Now the industry is actually doing a withdrawal of computing power. CoreChi has been steadily working on L2+ computing power, and now we actually see that it is the most practical computing power."

She said that 70% of the cars on the market are priced below 150,000 yuan. Not all cars really need the highest GPU computing power. Many cars are actually very good with the existing computing power, and the R&D costs invested are more cost-effective.

3. Domestic substitution of automotive chips

A blowout wave of smart electric vehicles has emerged in China, and the heavyweight players in the industry chain should have been born here.

In the past few years, local suppliers focusing on intelligent driving, cockpit chips and MCUs have continued to emerge. Judging from the shipment volume and the number of mass-produced models, domestic chips have achieved impressive results with millions of pieces shipped and dozens of models installed.

On the positive side, domestic suppliers' chip products cost less and their service response speed is faster than that of foreign suppliers.

Zhang Xitong, product and marketing director of CoreDrive, said, "Domestic automakers are facing fierce competition. They need to provide differentiated functions that many others do not have. They need chips to support customization from the bottom up. It is difficult for foreign manufacturers to support this demand because their main customers are not in China. CoreDrive can provide some customization and is more flexible."

However, it should also be noted that domestic chips have not achieved a crushing victory over foreign suppliers like power batteries and lidar. This is related to the design and performance of the chips.

At this year's Beijing Auto Show, Xinchi Technology released the cockpit chip X9CC and MCU E3650, and Horizon released a new generation of intelligent driving chip products, which improved the problems of chip design itself from a technical level and will inevitably accelerate the process of domestic substitution.