Chip shortages have led to a reduction in automobile production of more than 4 million units this year, and industrial robots have been deeply affected

Recently, the automotive industry has once again been hit by a chip shortage, causing many automakers to suspend or reduce production, and robots may be affected.

It is understood that due to the emergency supply of automotive chips, Jaguar Land Rover plans to cut car production at its factories in Solihull and Halewood, UK until the spring of 2023. The plan is expected to affect the production of models such as Jaguar F-Pace, Land Rover Discovery, and Range Rover Evoque.

FAW-Volkswagen's factory in Changchun, China, also encountered the dilemma of suspending two production lines due to a shortage of parts supply, with chip shortage being the main factor.

The global automobile market in 2022 was severely affected by the chip shortage. According to the latest data released by AutoForecast Solutions (AFS), an automotive industry data forecasting company, as of December 4, due to chip shortages, the cumulative number of automobiles produced in the global automobile market this year has reached approximately 4.186 million.

AFS said that Europe and Asia suffered the greatest impact, and most of the recent production cuts came from these two regions. It also predicted that due to insufficient chip supply, global regions may further reduce production by more than 200,000 vehicles in December. The cumulative production cuts in the global automobile market this year will climb to 4.393 million vehicles.

The chip shortage has lasted for nearly two years now, but the overall situation has not improved completely, the supply remains tight, and it is not expected to ease in a short period of time.

Some industry insiders said that due to the industry's misjudgment of the development trend of smart cars many years ago, chip suppliers only realized the problem and made adjustments last year, but the production cycle takes 2-4 years. The current global automotive-grade chip production capacity cannot meet demand, and there is no way to solve it from a cyclical perspective.

As cars become more intelligent, the demand for chips is also increasing. Functional chips MCU, power semiconductor devices (IGBT, MOSFET, etc.), and sensors are the three largest types of chips used in cars, widely involved in automotive electronic platforms, autonomous driving platforms, vision chips, radar chips, in-car 3D camera chips, car networking chips, etc.

According to statistics, the global automotive semiconductor market reached US$46.7 billion in 2021, and is expected to exceed US$80 billion in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 15%.

In addition, the automobile industry is now fully transforming towards electric vehicles, and electric vehicles have a greater demand for chips. The latest data shows that in November, my country's production and sales of new energy vehicles were 768,000 and 786,000, up 65.6% and 72.3% year-on-year, with a market share of 33.8%. From January to November, the production and sales of new energy vehicles were 6.253 million and 6.067 million, both up 100% year-on-year, with a market share of 25%.

Data from analysis agencies show that the current global semiconductor cost for pure electric vehicles has reached US$704, double the US$350 for traditional vehicles, of which the cost of power devices is US$387, accounting for 55%.

Some automotive supply chain manufacturers stated that the supply of automotive chips by IDM factories in 2023 will still be mainly based on the "rationing system", which cannot effectively meet the needs of each customer. The delivery cycle will still exceed 16 to 18 weeks. It is estimated that it may take 2 years to fully restore normal supply.

The chip shortage has led to a decline in automobile production, and the application of industrial robots will also be affected. As the largest application field, industrial robots have penetrated into all aspects of the automotive manufacturing industry, including arc welding, spot welding, assembly, handling, painting, testing, palletizing, grinding and polishing, and laser processing. Industrial robots are involved in all process links.

At the same time, as high-end intelligent devices, robots themselves have huge demand for semiconductor chips. The "chip shortage" that has continued to this day has not only caused price increases across the industry, but also led to a continuous extension of the supply cycle. In the financial reports released, the "four major families" of industrial robots all stated that they have serious backlogs of orders.

Nowadays, major chip manufacturers are actively expanding production capacity and adjusting production models, and introducing robot operations has become the choice of more and more companies. In fact, the degree of automation in chip manufacturing is not as high as imagined. For example, a large number of operators are often required to manually carry and transfer wafer boxes between each process machine in the workshop. The chip factory workshop has extremely high environmental requirements, such as dust-free level, anti-static, anti-vibration, etc. Traditional manual operations cannot meet these requirements well, and the use of robots is a better way.

Industry insiders say that the sweet period of robot automation and chip manufacturers is coming. In order to solve the problem of manual loading and unloading of chip raw materials, mobile robot companies have created various types of composite mobile robots for wafer fabs and packaging and testing plants that meet the full process of handling and production line docking operations, reducing manual participation, and realizing automatic transportation or automatic loading and unloading of materials in various workshops and machines, solving the problems of affected cleanliness levels, low efficiency and low yield.

Data shows that in the first half of this year, the number of robots used in semiconductors increased by more than 35% year-on-year, making it the fastest growing industry in terms of shipments along with lithium batteries.