Automotive chip: upwind volume, domestic replacement

With the continuous improvement of penetration rate of domestic automobile enterprises and the continuous maturity of domestic IC design and manufacturing capacity, the penetration rate of domestic chips in the field of intelligent electric vehicles will be rapidly increased in the future.

Since this year, the global outbreak of automotive chip short-term problems has continued so far. Why do car chips bother manufacturers?

An important reason is that the accelerated penetration of electric intelligent vehicles has become the core driving force for the rapid growth of the automotive semiconductor industry.

With the disruptive change of Tesla, the electrification and intelligentization of vehicles have gradually become the consensus of Oems, and consumers' consideration when buying cars has shifted from the traditional performance indicators to the intelligent experience perspective represented by intelligent vehicles and automatic driving.

When the focus at both ends of the industry is gradually shifting from performance to intelligence, the core of automotive innovation is also shifting from "power engine" to "computing engine" semiconductor.

Import substitution is the general trend

According to McKinsey, the proportion of on-board semiconductors for high-class autonomous vehicles (L3 or above) in Korea is expected to increase from 27.8 percent (5 billion dollars) in 2025 to 44.8 percent (13 billion dollars) in 2030. In terms of electrification, with the rapid increase in the penetration rate of new energy vehicles, "three-electric system" gradually replaces the traditional fuel power system, which is accompanied by a significant increase in the proportion of automotive electronics cost in the vehicle.

In the industry "lack of core" event and the trend of intelligent upgrading, the import substitution trend will accelerate, in 2019, the domestic automotive semiconductor market share of the global semiconductor 27%, is expected to increase to 40% in 2030.

According to the specific application fields of semiconductors in intelligent vehicles, automotive chips can be divided into five types:

Computing and control chips: this kind of chips are mainly microcontrollers and logic ICS, mainly used for computing analysis and decision-making, which can be divided into master chips and auxiliary chips.

Memory chip: mainly used for data storage, including DRAM (dynamic memory), SRAM (static memory), FLASH (FLASH memory chip), etc.

Sensor chip: it is mainly used to detect and feel external signals, physical conditions or chemical composition, and transfer the detected information to electrical signals or other required forms to other equipment.

Communication chip: mainly used for sending, receiving and transmitting communication signals, including baseband chip, radio frequency chip, channel chip, power line carrier communication chip, etc.

Energy supply chip: mainly used to ensure and regulate energy transmission, mainly discrete devices. It includes power management chip, transistor (IGBT, MOSFET, etc.) and so on.

With the rise of domestic automobile enterprises, the decoupling trend of hardware and software is obvious, and the original Tier 1 pattern is expected to be broken. The market share of domestic cabin Tier 1 May be significantly increased and the chip supply pattern may be changed. Second, the automotive chip supply chain itself may change from the traditional vertical pattern to the network. With the increasing complexity of automobile functions, simple system integration has been difficult to meet the needs of the era of intelligent vehicles.

In the future, automotive enterprises may begin to attach importance to the ability to define hardware systems and supply chains, and adopt horizontal management strategies for core chips to strengthen control, which may eventually accelerate the evolution of chip supply chain pattern.

According to the statistics of McKinsey, the scale of the domestic automotive semiconductor industry is expected to reach 18 billion US dollars in 2025. The market is expected to reach $29 billion by 2030.