A group of China’s top new energy vehicle manufacturers, including NIOXPeng Motor and Lee Automobile All of these companies are researching the development of their own self-driving chips, according to a LatePost report on Oct. 8.
It costs about 3 billion yuan ($421.6 million) to manufacture the original self-driving chip, including IP purchases, tapeouts and labor costs. The time from development, tapeout, and testing of a new chip to its application in a vehicle is approximately three to four years. Therefore, NIOXPengand Li Autoself-driving chips could be available in vehicles as early as 2024.
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Of the three companies, NIO We are the first company to research self-driving chips and offer the largest investment. Its chip research team was founded in late 2020 and is affiliated with NIO.Intelligent Driving Hardware Division led by Bai Jian, Vice President of NIO hardware.Bai served as OPPO hardware director and head of Xiaomichip business.
Currently, NIO has nearly 300 personnel, whose director is the former head of HiSilicon, a Chinese fabless semiconductor company.Individual joins NIO First half of last year. The team he is developing two chips. One is a highly autonomous chip and the other is a lidar chip.
See also: NIO targets four European markets with three EV launches
XPeng We began hiring chip talent at the end of 2020 and accelerated hiring in April 2021. Team size is less than his 200 people. During his first six months, Benny Katibian, his COO of XPeng,I was in charge of the chip team at the North American subsidiary of Before joining XPeng, Katibian was VP of Engineering at Qualcomm. In 2020, I will be leaving earlier this year. XPeng’s current direct contactThe chip team is a former DJI employee who joined the company in June last year.
Source close to XPeng XPeng told LatePost We are developing an autonomous driving chip that can compete with Tesla’s FSD (Full Self-Driving) technology, and its computing power exceeds 1000 TOPS.
Li Auto We are in the early stages of our investigation and are relatively cautious. Li Auto has dozens of peoplechip team. This cautious stance is related to founder and CEO Li Xiang’s desire to develop intelligent his systems for automobiles. He said he believes operating systems should be built before chips, like Apple and Tesla have done.
lee autolayout is similar to BYD, which has invested heavily in power semiconductors. The company claims power semiconductors are more important and a higher priority than self-driving chips.In July this year, Li Automobile established Suzhou power semiconductor production line Collaboration with Sanan Semiconductor has begun, and production is scheduled to start in 2024.
In a nutshell, auto companies require a very large investment to build chips, and their performance is difficult to outperform existing suppliers. But with the current wave of global inflation and ongoing chip shortages, LatePost argues that chip manufacturing is the last vehicle for auto companies to survive. In addition to his three companies above, many other Chinese auto companies such as Geely, Leapmotor and BYD are also developing automated intelligent driving and chips.