In late July, the U.S. Senate passed the "Chip Act" with $52 billion in matching subsidies, and sent it to the House of Representatives for a vote. In the U.S. Senate version of the "Chip Act" draft, it is clear that semiconductor companies that have received subsidies from the U.S. "Chip Act" are prohibited from building or expanding semiconductor factories with advanced manufacturing processes in mainland China within the next ten years.

Since then, there is no other way for chips, and autonomous control is the only way! "Some people in the automotive media pointed out. Under the crisis of "lack of cores", Chinese car companies and related industry chain companies are accelerating their advance to the deep-water area of domestic substitution.

｜Self-research is the only way

The autonomous driving chip has been hailed as the "Mount Everest" in the field of chips.

With the peak of the smartphone market, in-vehicle main control chips have become the next battlefield targeted by mobile phone chip giants. The first half of new energy vehicles is electrification, and the second half is intelligent.

In March, BYD announced to cooperate with NVIDIA, and will be equipped with NVIDIA DRIVEHyperion platform on some of its models next year to realize intelligent driving of vehicles; Power autonomous driving chip Journey 5 to achieve high-level autonomous driving functions.

Mobile's self-developed chips have been supplied for more than ten years, and the global market share is quite high. It is mainly based on the EyeQ series. At present, EyeQ6 has been released. Nvidia started around the same time, from Xiaopeng X2 to Orin this year , which may be mass-produced, to Atlan 's next-generation chips in 24 or 25 years .

Qualcomm has been doing chips for a long time, and it has only been two years since it has been doing autonomous driving chips. This year, Great Wall will mass-produce Qualcomm 8540+9000 models. The outbreak period will be in 23 years. car.

Domestic Horizon already has many mass production projects, with a relatively wide layout and great potential. Black Sesame also has some mass production, but generally after the horizon, Xinchi, Xinqing, etc. also have the support of large enterprises. Leaprun also produces the chip Lingxin, which is an internal control chip.

｜AI chip accelerates boarding

New models launched this year began to use AI chips. The new models launched by major car companies this year have ushered in the era of AI chips.

Among them, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Mobileye have a relatively high market share: Mobileye started early in the field of intelligent driving, while Qualcomm and NVIDIA are in the leading positions in the field of intelligent cockpit and autonomous driving respectively. At the same time, independent AI chip manufacturers also have strong competitiveness, represented by Horizon and Huawei: Extreme Fox Alpha S and Celis SF5 are equipped with Huawei AI chips and computing platforms, and Lantu FREE and Zhiji L7 are equipped with Horizon Journey series chips.

In the competition pattern of AI chips: Mobileye started the earliest and has the highest market share; Qualcomm and NVIDIA are in the leading positions in the fields of smart cockpit and autonomous driving respectively, and the computing power of NVIDIA's autonomous driving product Atlan can reach 1000TOPS. At the same time, the Orin chip using the 7nm process can achieve 200TOPS computing performance per second, and the power consumption is only 45W. The SA8195 chip in Qualcomm's smart cockpit adopts a 7nm process and supports L4 autonomous driving level. In terms of autonomous driving, Qualcomm RideSoC adopts an advanced 5nm process with a computing power of 700-760TOPS. Rapid development, rapid product update, extensive cooperation with domestic OEMs, with Horizon and Huawei being the most prominent.

｜Autonomous driving chips enter the golden track

With the continuous development of automobile intelligence, the computing power required for autonomous driving technology has shown an exponentially explosive growth, and "chips" have become an important part of the automotive industry.

Autonomous driving moves from L2, L3, L4 to L5, and each step up will increase the computing power demand by at least 10 times, which means that the demand for automotive chips, especially large computing power chips, will maintain a rapid growth trend .

Now is the early stage of the development of the autonomous driving chip industry, and the industry leaders have not formed an absolute advantage. At the same time, the characteristics of automotive-grade autonomous driving chips make it difficult for the product to form an oligopolistic market structure. However, the current stage is also the best time for the major autopilot chip companies to staking their horses. Which chip product can accumulate more customers, it is easier to form a more mature ecosystem, which will accumulate greater advantages for subsequent competition.

In the long run, this round of 'lack of cores' has made the entire industry and relevant management departments aware of the risks, which has given my country's automotive chip industry an opportunity for rapid development.

The golden track for self-driving chips has opened, and domestic self-driving chip companies are currently performing well. In this vast market, domestic self-driving chip companies are expected to achieve greater victories.