The chip business behind charging piles

With the booming new energy vehicle market, the concept of new energy vehicles has passed the market education period. Consumers have a full understanding of the safety and performance of electric vehicles, but "range anxiety" is still a major flaw. Although the density of charging piles has increased in large cities, for people who are going to travel long distances, "faster refueling" and "easier to find gas stations" are still irreplaceable advantages of gasoline vehicles.

Earlier, a netizen posted a photo of a charging station in a highway service area: the charging station has a total of 8 charging guns, but they have been fully occupied by 8 new energy vehicles, and there are also four electric vehicles waiting in line. There is also a new energy vehicle owner who has experienced 13 round trips to charge and queued for 3 hours to wait for a charging pile.

In order to solve the mileage problem of electric car owners, on the one hand, electric car manufacturers are working hard on electric car batteries, and on the other hand, the market is also looking forward to a more complete charging and swapping infrastructure system. The General Office of the State Council recently issued the "Guiding Opinions on Further Building a High-Quality Charging Infrastructure System", proposing that by 2030, a high-quality charging infrastructure system with wide coverage, moderate scale, reasonable structure and complete functions will be basically built to strongly support the development of the new energy vehicle industry and effectively meet the people's travel and charging needs.

This signal indicates that the number of domestic charging piles is expected to increase significantly in the future, and the increase in the number of charging piles will inevitably drive the development of related semiconductor products.

01 How big is the market potential of charging piles?

According to statistics from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, in 2022, my country's production and sales of new energy vehicles reached 7.058 million and 6.887 million respectively, up 96.9% and 93.4% year-on-year, respectively. Among them, the sales of pure electric vehicles were 5.365 million, up 81.6% year-on-year. In 2022, the increase in charging infrastructure was 2.593 million units, of which the increase in public charging piles increased by 91.6% year-on-year, and the increase in private charging piles equipped with vehicles continued to rise, up 225.5% year-on-year. As of December 2022, the cumulative number of charging infrastructure nationwide was 5.21 million units, an increase of 99.1% year-on-year. As of the end of May this year, the scale of charging infrastructure has reached 6.356 million units.

However, from the perspective of market ownership or growth, the development speed of charging piles has not yet fully caught up with the development speed of new energy vehicles. From the perspective of market ownership, in 2022, my country's charging infrastructure ownership will reach 5.21 million units, the number of new energy vehicles will be 13.1 million, and the ratio of cars to piles will be 2.5:1. From the perspective of growth, in 2022, my country's charging infrastructure growth will be 2.593 million units, the sales of new energy vehicles will be 6.887 million, and the ratio of cars to piles will be 2.7:1. In contrast to such data, it can be foreseen that in order to achieve a 1:1 ratio of cars to piles, the charging pile market must develop faster in order to catch up with the rapidly growing new energy vehicle market.

In February 2023, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and eight other departments issued a notice on organizing the pilot work of the pilot zone for the comprehensive electrification of public vehicles. The key tasks mentioned in the notice include promoting the innovative application of new technologies. Accelerate the application of new charging and battery replacement technologies such as intelligent and orderly charging, high-power charging, automatic charging, and fast battery replacement.

In order to build a moderately advanced, balanced, intelligent and efficient charging and swapping infrastructure system, the pilot areas plan to achieve a 1:1 ratio between the number of new public charging piles (standard piles) and the number of new energy vehicles promoted in the public sector (standard vehicles), and the proportion of charging facilities in highway service areas is expected to be no less than 10% of small parking spaces.

02 “Faster Charging” Drives the Power Device Market

In the construction of charging stations, the main cost comes from the hardware equipment of charging piles. Specifically, taking the common DC charging piles with a power of about 120kW as an example, its equipment composition includes charging modules, power distribution filtering equipment, monitoring and billing equipment, battery maintenance equipment, etc., and the charging module accounts for up to 50%.

At present, the biggest demand of new energy vehicle owners is faster charging, which puts forward relevant requirements for charging modules. The components in the charging module mainly include power devices, magnetic components, capacitors, PCB, etc. The main cost structure is: power devices (30%), magnetic components (25%), capacitors (10%), PCB (10%), and others such as chassis fans account for 15%.

It is not difficult to see that power devices are the core components for realizing electric energy conversion. The development of new energy vehicles has put forward requirements for charging piles such as high power density, high power and high efficiency. In charging piles, high-voltage super junction MOSFET has become the mainstream choice for fast charging due to its high efficiency and low impedance. In 2025, the global DC pile SJ MOS market size is expected to exceed 2 billion yuan. The DC charging pile converts the input AC power into DC power through its own AC/DC charging module, and directly completes the transformation and rectification without OBC. Super junction MOSFET has become a mainstream high-power charging pile power device application product due to its lower conduction loss, switching loss, high reliability and high power density.

According to Infineon statistics, a 100kW charging pile requires power devices worth US$200-300. It is expected that with the continuous construction of charging piles, the global DC pile super junction MOSFET market size is expected to exceed 2 billion yuan in 2025, and will fully benefit from the rapid development of charging piles.

Silicon carbide materials are also becoming more and more promising in the field of charging piles. Fierce market competition has led to the demand for lower overall system costs, long-term operation in harsh environments (such as high temperature, high humidity, smoke and dust, etc.) has led to reliability issues, tight construction land has led to higher power density requirements for charging piles, and operators have put forward higher and higher overall efficiency requirements due to cost pressure, etc. Faced with these technical challenges, more and more charging pile module engineers have begun to seek third-generation power semiconductor silicon carbide solutions to achieve the use of fewer devices to meet greater single-machine capacity requirements.

In addition, some new technical directions of charging piles, such as high power (such as 30kW and above) to achieve fast charging of electric vehicles, bidirectional charging function to achieve energy feedback, higher and wider output voltage range (such as 200V-750V or even 1000V) to cover various new energy vehicle batteries, etc., these new technical development directions also provide huge application opportunities for silicon carbide semiconductors.

03 "Smarter Charging" drives other chips

Building an intelligent network of charging piles means that owners of new energy vehicles can pay fees, find nearby charging piles, and track charging progress through their mobile phones. These functions require the support of relevant chips. In addition to the core power module, the charging pile is also composed of control modules, communication modules, and other parts.

The control module plays a role in multiple links of the charging pile, such as controlling the entire charging process and completing the charging sequence for the car; completing the communication and control of the charging module (rectifier); supporting multiple AC and DC meters; main control signals of the charging system; indicator light control; motor input switch status, and emergency button status detection.

In the communication module, the GPRS communication module communicates with the MCU via UART to upload data, thereby connecting the charging pile controller and the user. When monitoring the current, voltage and other data of the charging pile in real time, the communication module can also transmit the real-time collected data to the server. The display screen can display data such as charging amount, cost, and charging time.

Looking more closely, some chips will also be used in charging piles, such as temperature detection chips: quantitatively analyze the relationship between electrical signals and temperature changes, establish a temperature prediction model, prevent accidents caused by excessive temperature, and improve temperature control quality.

In the above process, it is not difficult to find that each module is inseparable from the MCU. In general, the MCU can realize functions such as HMI, metering and billing, payment, data encryption and decryption, charging equipment start and stop control, and vehicle platform and Internet communication in the charging pile.

04 Domestic manufacturers’ layout

In the market for power devices for charging piles, some domestic companies have already put their products into commercial use.