Unigroup Guoxin crosses borders to enter the automotive electronics field and will fill the gap in automotive-grade chips

Unigroup Guoxin and the National Innovation Center signed a strategic cooperation agreement. The two parties will collaborate in innovation and carry out cross-border cooperation in areas such as the formulation and updating of new energy vehicle chip standards, and the research and development and testing of automotive-grade safety chips.

Ziguang's circle of friends

In fact, Unigroup Guoxin has long been involved in automotive electronics. In April 2018, Unigroup established Beijing Unigroup Intelligent Automobile Technology Co., Ltd., announcing Unigroup's official entry into the automotive market. Ma Daojie, the new president of Unigroup Guoxin, serves as chairman, and He Huajie (previously worked at NetPosa and China Unicom) serves as general manager of Unigroup Intelligent Automobile Company. Subsequently, Unigroup has successively cooperated with Foton Motor.

Subsequently, Tsinghua Unigroup announced a strategic partnership with 360 Group. The two parties will jointly establish the "360-Tianjin Unigroup" joint security laboratory, leveraging their respective software and hardware industry advantages to jointly create a security ecosystem that comprehensively covers chips, terminals, networks and clouds. The two parties will launch the first highly secure and high-performance "automotive safety brain" - the Internet of Vehicles security chip, to create a real-time protection system for smart cars.

Last September, Unigroup Guoxin signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Neusoft Integration, announcing the comprehensive deepening of the cooperation between the two parties and launching all-round cooperation in the fields of 5G applications, information security, automotive electronics, etc. At the same time, it was announced that its independently developed THD89 series products successfully passed the AEC-Q100 automotive certification and are one of the highest-level automotive chips in China. This means that China's automotive safety chip products have been recognized and respected by the global industry and have obtained an important ticket to enter the international automotive module manufacturers.

In addition, Tsinghua Unigroup has also established a joint venture with Mobileye, with Tsinghua Unigroup holding 51% and Mobileye holding 49%. The two parties will work together to develop autonomous driving technology.

Mobileye is an Israeli company dedicated to autonomous driving. It has been engaged in research and development for 12 years and has gained unprecedented technical knowledge. The company is at the forefront of the world in the development of monocular vision advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). According to Mobileye's statistics, there are currently 27 million vehicles from more than 25 automakers using driver assistance systems to varying degrees, and Mobileye's market share exceeds 70%. It is expected that by the end of 2019, 100,000 vehicles with L3 autonomous driving functions will be equipped with Mobileye technology, and Mobileye's chip shipments will exceed 32 million pieces in total. Tsinghua Unigroup's cooperation with Mobileye can not only obtain technical support, but also expand its own business, which can be said to kill two birds with one stone.

The automotive-grade chip market is booming

Automotive electronic products are generally expensive. One of the main reasons is that they use automotive-grade electronic components. Automotive-grade chips have high requirements for the environment, reliability, consistency, manufacturing process, etc. It can be said that automotive certification is a nightmare for many chip companies, because these standards are like a watershed, dividing low-end and high-end, new players and old players.

They can be roughly divided into four categories: the first category is traditional automotive chip manufacturers such as NXP, Texas Instruments, and Renesas; the second category is old-fashioned consumer electronic chip companies represented by Qualcomm, NVIDIA, etc.; the third category is vehicle manufacturers represented by Tesla; and the fourth category is new domestic chip forces, such as CoreChips, NavInfo, GigaDevice, and other companies.

The automotive-grade chip market has also been extremely hot in the past two years. In 2018, Fudan Microelectronics officially released its first automotive-grade front-end ISP chip FH8310 at a media conference. At the conference, they also jointly announced with BYD that FH8310 has been mass-produced in its Tang II new energy vehicles.

At the beginning of last year, GigaDevice announced that its full range of GD25 SPI NOR Flash products have completed AEC-Q100 certification. It is currently the only domestically produced automotive-grade flash memory product, and can provide high-performance and high-reliability flash memory solutions for the automotive original equipment market and specific applications that require automotive-grade products.

In 2018, AutoChips, a wholly-owned subsidiary of NavInfo, announced that the first domestic automotive-grade MCU that passed AEC-Q100 Grade 1 and has an operating temperature of -40℃~125℃ was mass-produced by the client and received the first batch of orders. Earlier this year, AutoChips announced that its automotive-grade MCU (microcontroller) product line has added a heavyweight new member - AC7801X.

In the field of AI chips, Horizon Robotics has also officially announced the mass production of the second-generation Journey chip for intelligent driving. The launch of the second-generation Journey officially fills the gap in China's automotive-grade AI chip field and also fills the key link in the construction of the domestic autonomous driving industry ecosystem.

Broad market

According to IHS's forecast, by 2025, China's automotive semiconductor market will reach 120 billion yuan, and if the demand for autonomous driving is included, the market space will reach 170 billion yuan. The resonance of multiple factors is contributing to the rise of domestically produced large-scale chips for independent vehicles.

In February 2020, the National Development and Reform Commission and 11 other departments jointly issued the "Intelligent Vehicle Innovation and Development Strategy", which clearly proposed six specific tasks for the development of intelligent vehicles, and aimed to achieve large-scale production of conditionally autonomous intelligent vehicles by 2025, and realize the commercial application of highly autonomous intelligent vehicles in specific environments.

Against this background, domestic semiconductor companies have flocked to the automotive-grade chip industry, filling the gap in domestic automotive-grade chips from different segments. This is also the main reason why Unigroup Guoxin has increased its investment in automotive electronics.