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Automotive supply chain players are skeptical if TSMC, Intel and Samsung's pursuit of advanced process technologies and capacity expansions will bring real benefits in the long run to the tight supply of mature-process chips.
www.digitimes.com
Anyone have access to DigiTimes content? Not that I'm expecting much useful information, but I'm curious.
They may be right from the aspect that the disaggregated supply chain of legacy auto makers means it’s really hard to combine circuits and functions into a smaller quantity of (more advanced) chips for cost savings.
Ford is starting to do this - separating their ICE (internal combustion engine) and EV businesses, and running the EV business much differently (direct to consumer, more central engineering).
Though at the same time there’s also a challenge for improved infotainment in cars which is ‘new’ silicon needed so that reduces available capacity elsewhere. AMD is selling millions of TSMC N7 chips just for Tesla now (annually).
With more autonomy of functions that are critical to safety, more advanced chips, sensors and intelligence are needed from chips every year. An engineer working on autonomous vehicles says the technology is wickedly hard to make a self-driving car. This is more and more sophisticated chips, not less.
With more autonomy of functions that are critical to safety, more advanced chips, sensors and intelligence are needed from chips every year. An engineer working on autonomous vehicles says the technology is wickedly hard to make a self-driving car. This is more and more sophisticated chips, not less.
Automotive supply chain players are skeptical if TSMC, Intel and Samsung's pursuit of advanced process technologies and capacity expansions will bring real benefits in the long run to the tight supply of mature-process chips.
www.digitimes.com
Anyone have access to DigiTimes content? Not that I'm expecting much useful information, but I'm curious.
At the moment, only one to two 5nm or 7nm chips are required for a high-end in-vehicle computer, and such advanced chips are needless for up to 90% of vehicles, supply chain sources said.
The need for more chips been largely driven by regulation. No need for a radar = significant drop in amount of chips needed.
Tesla only broke the 1 million mark last year, mostly thanks to China. Toyota makes more of only Corolla's than Tesla's entire global production.
Most cars around the world are incomparably more dumber than even lowest-end cars sold in North America. Electronics been largely been driven by higher regulation. Non-ABS cars for example are sold plenty in Asia.
Even the presence of audio built-in in low-end cars is due to a number of countries demanding radios in cars as an emergency preparedness measure. A lot of cars sold in Asia come with just an empty DIN slot.
The last mass manufactured IC-less car in the word was only taken off manufacturing in 2019.
Also, I wrote than even higher end-cars end up with less ICs.
The ABS box on my parents car in nineties was the size of a brick. Now, an ABS system is just a single microcontroller, which may also double as a TCS, and ESC system. Both were also separate boxes in years prior, with own set of sensors.
ECUs also got remarkably smaller, and simpler. Gone are the days when car ECUs were packing up to 10 FPGAs. Many are just a single MCU on the inside.
The new trend of EV is much lower price and cost to survive. Look at price of Tesla and BYD. Autonomous might never come so why overkill with advanced chip in the near term.
The new trend of EV is much lower price and cost to survive. Look at price of Tesla and BYD. Autonomous might never come so why overkill with advanced chip in the near term.
Yes, absolutely. Cheapest EVs in China even use simple rheostat for throttle, and simply wire it into the inverter analog circuitry through PWM adc, no need for real digital control.
And their inverters in their majority are of simplest tripple IGBT design
