Industry insiders: Chinese startups make breakthroughs in automotive ICs

According to media reports, Chinese start-ups have played an important role in developing in-vehicle ICs for applications such as smart cockpits, ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems) and autonomous driving, but are expected to face huge competitive challenges in the next five years.

According to reports, in December 2021, Syntech will be the first to launch the SE1000 smart cockpit multimedia SoC based on the 7nm process, which is the benchmark product of Qualcomm SA8155P, and will start mass production in the second half of 2022.

At present, Synengine Technology has completed the testing of SE1000 and has obtained the opportunity for Geely Auto to adopt the SoC in its new models. In addition, core engine technology also cooperates with China Desay Group, ArcherMind Technology, Juefei Technology, Haiwei Technology, etc. to promote the application of SE1000.

Jiefa Technology has also been working on the development of smart cockpit SoCs and released the fifth-generation model AC8025, which optimizes the output of video and combines DSP (Digital Signal Processing)-based audio solutions.

According to data from ICV Tank in Hong Kong, China, the smart cockpit market value in China will grow to 107.2 billion yuan ($15.9 billion) in 2025, 2.14 times that of 2020.

The report pointed out that Horizon, Cambrian, Xinchi Technology and Black Sesame Company all focus on in-vehicle ICs for autonomous driving.

Among them, Horizon is the first company to start mass production of in-vehicle high-performance computing ICs for automakers, and is technically able to provide autonomous driving IC solutions for L2 to L4. "Journey 5" is a series of artificial intelligence inference processors developed by Horizon and has been adopted by Chinese automakers such as BYD.

Cambrian plans to launch L2 autonomous driving ICs and L4 autonomous driving ICs in 2022-2023, while Corestech will launch an intelligent driving SoC with a computing power of 200TOPS (trillion operations per second) in the fourth quarter of 2022.

In addition, Black Sesame has launched the "Huashan No. 2 A1000", which is currently the only IC among domestic IC design companies that supports L3 and above autonomous driving.