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Automakers Develop Their Own Chips Prepare for Entering into EV Industry

Aug 10 2022

Hyundai Motor Company plans to develop its own chips to meet the challenge of insufficient supply of automotive-grade semiconductors.

 

Following the shortage of microcontrollers, IGBTs have become the next protagonist of tight supply. The continuous shortages have made automakers realize the importance of self-developed chips.

The development of intelligence will only increase the challenges to semiconductors. Different from consumer electronic chip technology, automotive-grade chips are almost all technologies more than ten years ago, and have very high requirements for performance indicators, service life, reliability, safety, and quality consistency. More than 90% of the world's automotive semiconductor manufacturers are concentrated in Microchip, STMicroelectronics, Infineon, Renesas and NXP.

Why are electric vehicles affected so much by semiconductor shortages?

In automotive applications, various chips are required from the tire pressure monitoring system TMPS to the vehicle controller and the autonomous driving domain controller. The most important automotive chips include microcontrollers, power semiconductors and sensors.

With the development of automobile intelligence, although the overall sales of automobiles have declined, the sales of electric vehicles have increased.

Electronic Vehicles

New energy vehicles require a large number of power semiconductors to meet the frequent voltage conversion requirements of vehicles, and many parts of the vehicle are also inseparable from the blessing of power semiconductors. For example, it requires a large number of DC-AC inverters, transformers, converters, etc., which have a very large demand for semiconductor devices such as IGBTs, MOSFETs, and diodes.

The large voltage and current involved in electric vehicle batteries require the use of high-power semiconductors, which have a great effect on expanding the battery life of electric vehicles. And high-performance semiconductors are an integral part of autonomous driving and artificial intelligence. In the future, the use of embedded artificial intelligence will require more advanced semiconductors as people demand more complex functions in cars.

As a result, when the semiconductor supply chain disrupts the supply of such devices, it is difficult for auto companies to develop new technologies to support functional requirements. This also means that if the power semiconductors required for independent research and development and production can be independently developed and produced, it will become the key for car companies to enter the electric vehicle industry.

Automakers develop their own chips

A shortage of semiconductor supplies has prompted automakers to start chip-in-house research programs. In order to weaken the impact of tight semiconductor supply, self-developed chips are indeed one of the effective ways to solve the shortage of semiconductor supply. For example, Tesla gave up chips from Intel's Mobileye and Nvidia to develop its own self-driving chips for cars such as the Model 3.

Hyundai Motor Company announced that it will prepare its own chips to enter the electric vehicle industry. It will turn to its semiconductor subsidiary, Hyundai Mobis, to develop and produce power semiconductors.

"We specialize in power semiconductors and are developing and producing them. We also see system semiconductors as an area of development," the company said.

Over the past few years, more and more companies have turned to custom chips due to their numerous advantages. For example, a product designed to be portable needs to make the most of every watt of energy consumed, which is difficult to do with off-the-shelf components (as these will undoubtedly have internal components and peripheral designs that are ultimately not needed). Additionally, engineers can focus on adding additional peripherals appropriate to their final design, which means custom silicon devices are not only efficient but also powerful.

For Hyundai Motor, it is not only exploring custom silicon, but also in-house manufacturing. Many industries do not rely on the latest semiconductor technology and are more than happy to use semiconductor nodes from 2000. Given how easy it has become to manufacture such devices, it has become more economical for large corporations to manufacture their own.


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