Challenge Qualcomm 8155 domestic "core" hopes

The future of the century -old automotive industry is supported on the square -inch silicon wafer.

Ascending the giant wheels of the times, car companies are going to the era of software to define cars.

The opportunity is approaching, and a Chinese cars with a talked about a Jiazi have begun to emerge. Sometimes the rotation of transportation is also indispensable behind the sweat and toughness. In short, in the road competition of new energy vehicles, the Chinese brand has already shined. Its courage not only comes from the bottom of the world's largest automotive market, but also because of all industrial categories in the United Nations industrial classification, and the world's only world.

Thanks to the huge industrial development advantage and manufacturing potential, China's new energy vehicle industry and market have achieved the world's first place. In July of this year, China's new energy passenger car market share accounted for 68%of the world's global, which means that 7 new energy vehicles in the world are driving on China.

The world to the east and China are the epitome of the new energy vehicle blowout. But does it mean that the end is now? Not really.

The development of any industry cannot be achieved overnight. It is just that in the process of exploring, electrification has become a foothold of the "revolution" of new energy vehicles, and it also creates prerequisites for the realization of highly smart cars. In the second half of the development of new energy vehicles, the degree of intelligence is the real victory. The chip that is responsible for coordinating the "brain" of each part directly determines the upper limit of the brand.

In this context, a series of numbers such as 8155, 820A, 8295 are regarded by car companies as a password to success.

Who is "8155"? This chip is called Qualcomm SA8155P. It is the flagship product of Qualcomm's 3rd generation digital cockpit platform. It is also the "net red product" in the current SOC chip of the car -level regulatory level. At this moment, "8155" is running on the motherboards of more than 20, hundreds of thousands of autonomous mid -to -high -end models. These models are the epitome of Chinese cars as a whole. At the same time, they are also at the forefront of competing with foreign car brands.

Does the complicated information be opened, does the Qualcomm 8155 mean a high -sales conversion rate? The answer is no, after all, Tesla and BYD, who are in the new energy market, did not use this net red chip.

In addition, in the "Daily Economic News" reporter survey, many chip industry practitioners gave the same view- "In the field of smart cockpits, Qualcomm 8155 is not irreplaceable." The reason is that based on mobile phone consumer chips The Qualcomm 8155 is not the same as the R & D and design process of car -level chips.

On the contrary, domestic smart -level smart cockpit chips that can replace Qualcomm 8155 are no longer a few: Xinchi's smart cockpit chip "Core" X9, Horizon's journey 5. The Dragon Eagle No. 1 that has just completed the streaming film ...

"Previously, the domestic car chip market share was only 2.5%, and most of them were low -end chips. For us, the first step was to make the product well, and the second step was to reduce the cost to the same Taiwan Competition. "Chen Shujie, vice president and chief brand officer of Xinchi Science and Technology, believes that domestic chips have ushered in the window period, and localized research and development and production will occupy an advantage in future competition.

Right now, the US "2022 Chip and Science Act" is officially signed to raise chip manufacturing to the height of the national strategy, trying to force China into a chip "island" with industrial advantages. And when the world of nano -measurement is artificially planned, the real change may not be far away.

Source: Reporter sorted out the visual Chinese map Liu Hongmei drawing

Qualcomm 8155 is not irreplaceable

"7nm craft manufacturing, 8 cores, 8TOPS computing power, integrates CPU, GPU, NPU, AI engine, including handling ISPs of various cameras, supporting multi -display DPUs, integrated audio processing and other functions." It is the hardware capability of Qualcomm 8155.

Is Gaocun 8155 "God's God" as the outside world says? the answer is negative.

In fact, this chip originated from the Snapdragon 855 chip on the smartphone platform 4 years ago, through a series of targets such as "reducing the frequency of CPU", "Improving the frequency of GPU and NPU", "strengthening video images and other data such as video images" The "magic reform" of the car usage scene was born.

"Gaotong 8155 is indeed developed on the basis of mobile phone consumption chips. To use it on a car, you need to set up multiple operating systems, and at the same time meet functional security requirements.

The Gaotong 8155 has local voice, which can help the car's voice system to achieve visible, delay listening, and full scenes. Shen Ziyu, chairman and chief executive officer of Yitong Technology, explained to reporters the reason why Qualcomm 8155 popular.

The founder, chairman and CEO of Weimar Automobile Shen Hui also explained the reason why the car company chose Qualcomm 8155 from the perspective of the OEM. "The advantage of the Gaotong 8155 is that it is an ARM processor architecture, which has mature adaptation with the Android system. At present, almost all the vehicle system is also an Android architecture. Qualcomm 8155 is based on the adaptability of chips and systems, as well as the opening of software. And the richer rising rapidly, "Shen Hui said.

For car companies, "useism" that can accurately match the demand is not indispensable, especially today, which is increasingly "electronic" in smart cars, the intuitive crushing of parameters is far more than telling stories. Syrian feelings can more provoke the urge to consumers, which is also the reality behind "8155".

It should be noted that "8155" is not competent. Generally speaking, chips are divided into consumer -level, industrial -level and vehicle regulations, and the difficulty and quality standards are increasing in order. As a chip developed on the basis of mobile phone consumer chips, the design process of Qualcomm 8155 is not exactly the same as the initial design process of many car -level chips. "Although some well -known chip brands have high performance nominal value, the design process of the entire chip is the design process of consumer electronics. The chip designed according to this process is unlikely to complete the ASIL (Automotive Safety Integration level, car safety Grade certification of integrity level. Only by the design process in accordance with the car rules -level process, the product produced can complete the car regulation certification. "Chen Shujie told reporters that from the perspective of the strict perspective of the car -level chip, Qualcomm 8155 is not not Irreplaceable.

How to make smart cockpit chips?

The birth of car -level chips is a long process. Strict technical considering the wisdom of the developer, repeated testing to polish the toughness of the practitioners, and the long cycle time cost also tests the patience of investors.

"A real smart cockpit chip needs to support many functions, including drive instruments, center control, rearview mirrors, rear entertainment, and support multi -screen sharing and interaction." Chen Shujie revealed that some chip strengths on the market cannot fully support the strength of the market. These functions, they can achieve only part of the smart cockpit chip function.

High -tech standards have extended the mass production time of car -level chips. The long -term research and development design is the first step. After that, the smart cockpit chip will take 3 to 6 months of streaming (small -scale trial production). Taking the recently debuted core engine technology 7nm "Dragon Eagle No. 1" chip as an example, it has been developed as early as 2019, and now it has just been completed.

"According to the law of science, the development of car -level chips has been difficult to achieve from 0, and it is impossible to achieve overnight. It needs a lot of technology to accumulate. It is already a very fast speed to really mass production in about a year. Objectively speaking, this speed is also based on our core R & D personnel with more than 20 years of solid chip research and development experience. "Chen Shujie Say.

Compared with time costs, the high threshold for auto -level certification also causes headaches for chip manufacturers. In addition to the general test standards of car regulatory element devices-AEC-Q100 reliability certification, car-level chips often need to pass the ISO26262 functional security product certification and national secret certification.

In particular, the ISO26262 functional security product certification is divided into different levels of ASIL. Among them, the ASIL-A-level chip can be applied to the sunroof control; ASIL-B chip can be applied to the dashboard display; ASIL-C chip can be applied to engine control; ASIL-D (level of the highest standard of car functional safety) chip Can be applied to autonomous driving, EPS.

"ISO26262 functional security product certification is very important, because smart cockpits are not just considering the comfort of entertainment, and car -level chips need to be balanced with function and safety. Some consumer -grade products may be shut down at extreme temperatures, but cars will The requirements of regulatory chips are much higher than ordinary consumer chips. If the rearview mirror failure and the dashboard card shell occurred during the vehicle driving process, "Chen Shujie said.

With more and more data to be processed by smart cars, information security has also become a problem for the industry. Therefore, national secret certification has also begun to become a certification standard for car -level chips.

Under normal circumstances, the certification cycle of a car -level chip is 2 to 3 years. However, when a series of certifications are completed, it does not mean that great achievements are achieved. At this time, the OEMs began to enter the fixed -point cooperation stage.

"Next, the OEM and chip provider should develop together. Because the chip is the bottom thing, the operating system and applications above the chip need to be debugged, so as to enter the chip lighting stage. For the overall process, the entire process will not be completed from one to one and a half years. "Chen Shujie said.

The good news is that with the early stage of domestic chip research and development and the acceleration of today, domestic chip manufacturers such as core Chi, Horizon, and Core Technology have begun to emerge.

For example, Xinchi has obtained more than 100 quantitative fixed -point models to achieve large -scale mass production; the horizon has also achieved mass production in front of Chinese car regulatory AI chips, reaching strategic cooperation with more than 20 car companies. Among them, in the field of smart cockpits, Horizon has more than 50 mass production models (including mass production and listing and designated cooperation models).

"Many car companies to promote Qualcomm 8155 have many business perspectives. In fact, a model of many car companies will not be equipped with Qualcomm 8155. On the contrary, many models choose domestic chips, and performance and performance It will not discount at all. "A chip industry who did not want to be named revealed.

Chip computing power Smart driving

With the entry of car -level chips, the computing power of the chip has become another dimension for car companies.

Computing power is usually used to refer to the performance of the chip. In simple terms, the greater the computing power of the chip, the better the performance. For 10 years since 2012, the GPU computing power demand for car -level chips has evolved from 20GFLOPS (that is, the number of floating -point operations of 1 billion times per second) to 700GFLOPS. Xia Yiping, CEO of Jiji Automobile, told reporters that the iterative advantages of the intelligent track require the chip to give a lot of support in computing power. In particular, many high -precision AI capabilities are inseparable from strong computing power.

"Behind the intelligent terminal must be computing power. Good chips can cooperate with software and hardware to achieve the synergistic mixed computing of software and hardware. System -level chip SOC required for smart cockts is a multi -core and heterogeneous mode. There are different operations inside the chip. The unit will solve different problems. "Shen Ziyu also raised the same point.

Based on this view, the car circle seems to have set off a competition on chip computing power parameters. For example, when collecting the first car robot concept car ROBO-01, Jiji Motors said that it will be equipped with Qualcomm 8295 computing platform with its computing power of 30TOPS, which is equivalent to the next two generations of Qualcomm 8155 (4TOPS). From the perspective of process technology, Qualcomm 8295 is the first 5nm car -level chip, and Qualcomm 8155 is a 7nm process process.

"The computing power of Gaotong 8295 is almost 8 times that of the Gaotong 8155. This is actually to enhance the intelligent experience of the cockpit, especially the intelligent voice interaction ability." Xia Yiping said.

At the same time as computing power competition, there are also voices that they cannot simply "discuss heroes by computing power."

"The power consumption restrictions of Moore's law, the pursuit of pure computing power breakthrough is not sustainable, and the computing power does not mean that the auto smart chip 'real performance', and the efficiency of chip computing also needs to pay attention." In terms of, horsepower (unit: HP) is not as good as a 100 -kilometer acceleration time (unit: second) more truly reflects the power performance of the vehicle, computing power (unit: TOPS) does not reflect the actual performance of the automotive intelligent chip, and accurately identifies the frame rate per second FPS is a more real performance indicator. "

Shen Hui also expressed the same point: "More advanced process technology will inevitably bring stronger power. In this sense, the inside of the chip is an objective scientific and technological development law. Evolution and iteration. But what needs to be known is the computing power ≠ chip, and the computing power is just a direction that the capital market picks up in the chip. "

Since the computing power of the chip is not equal to intelligent driving, why is there a "computing power stack"?

"Unlike the cockpit, high -level intelligent driving is still in the exploration stage. During the current landing process, there are a large number of Corner Case scenes that have not been excavated. The uncertainty of the scene has caused us to have sufficient hardware redundancy. For example, the Wima M7 uses 4 orin-X autonomous driving chips, with a comprehensive computing power of up to 1016TOPS and equipped with 3 lidar. The purpose is to provide sufficient hardware support for unpredictable scenes. In this logic, in this logic The first thing we must meet is the foundation of the foundation. "Shen Hui believes that reserved sufficient computing power and sufficient sensors is to leave redundancy for the technical upgrade of the future autonomous driving system.

"Domestic Replacement" ushered in the window period

The inner volume of the chip computing power also brings the inner volume of the chip manufacturer.

"From the current competitive pattern, foreign chip manufacturers have occupied multiple tracks. Objectively speaking, domestic chip manufacturers actually face great pressure, and there are also differences in generation. Dragon Eagle No. 1 has just been released; 5nm Qualcomm 8295 chips have been put on the market, and our (5nm chip) are still planning. "Shen Ziyu proposed an objective problem in the competition of domestic chip manufacturers in the competition of automotive -level chips.

As the car enters the second half of the intelligent competition, more and more players have begun to enter the car -level chip track of the car, trying to split a share.

In fact, there are reasons for domestic chips to rise.

In early August, the United States signed a 2022 chip and science bill, requiring chips to design and produce in the United States. Recently, the U.S. Department of Commerce (Agency and Security Agency) officially announced the final regulation to implement new export controls on four technologies such as EDA (Electronic Design Automation) software. The effective date of the relevant ban is August 15, 2022. It is worth mentioning that EDA software is known as the "mother of chip" and is the cornerstone industry of electronic design.

"EDA software belongs to the upstream industry of chip manufacturing, covering all processes such as integrated circuit design, wiring, verification and simulation. The chips we design in China basically use EDA software." Wei Yun, who is engaged in chip design, is helpless. " Starting abroad is a fact, but we are not software without domestic alternatives. Beijing Huada Nine Days and Hangzhou Guangliwei are all domestic EDA companies. "

The United States' deviations from the principle of fair competition have brought challenges to domestic chips, but the challenges often have opportunities. China has become the world's largest new energy vehicle market, and such a market size has also helped domestic chip manufacturers find breakthroughs in the crisis.

Shen Ziyu believes: "As the multi -core heterogeneity and SOC come out, domestic semiconductor companies have the opportunity. Because in this way, they no longer only compete with CPUs and GPUs, but to see the system capabilities of the chip." Apple's A series chips may not have an advantage in parameter performance compared to Qualcomm's contemporary chips, but it will be integrated with the software iOS, which will exert the effect of "1+1> 2". The chip industry also has the characteristics of scale effects. Due to the high cost of chip research and development, only a large number of users have diluted costs, the chip cost will decline. Therefore, cost control is also another breakthrough of domestic chips.

"On the one hand, the cost of many international chips itself is higher; on the other hand, it is more important that when we consider costs, we must not only consider the cost of the chip itself, but also consider the cost of the entire BOM, R & D cost, and related related costs. Software adaptation. In contrast, domestic chips not only have excellent product technology, but also have great cost advantages in terms of localization support and R & D costs, development investment, etc. "Chen Shujie said that more than 75%of Chinese cars in China are actually 15. In fact, 15%of cars are actually 15 in 15% Cars under 10,000 yuan, so domestic high -level chip manufacturers like Xinchi can strongly promote the development of the entire car intelligent development.

The industry generally believes that domestic chips have ushered in the opportunity of windows.

"Right now, the two best tracks of new energy vehicles and chips are intertwined. Our chip manufacturers must seize the best time. At present, our customers are mainly FAW and Geely. It has accounted for 24%of domestic cars, which is our cornerstone. Core engine technology also contacted other car manufacturers. After two to three years, we will be able to divide the world in the field of smart cockpits with Qualcomm 8155 chips. " Wang Kai, director and CEO of core engineering technology, told reporters.

Despite the "bullets flying" in the chip field, Wei Yun feels that the research and development and manufacturing of the domestic chip industry chain is gradually mature, and everyone is making the market cake bigger.

Chen Shujie even believes that domestic chips have no problems in the professionalism of technology, industrial chain, and employees. Under the polishing of time, domestic chips have no reason to be unsuccessful.

Remember/

There is no reason for domestic chips to be unsuccessful

The demand for car chips brought by electrification is about twice the traditional fuel vehicles, and the demand brought by intelligence increases to 8-10 times. "Competition of car -level chips is the key to future car competition." This is the most true feeling of reporters when communicating with chip practitioners.

Due to the excellent parameters and mature adaptation with the Android system, the "Qualcomm 8155" once occupied the right to speak in the field of smart cockpit chips. But under the huge loud wave, in fact, many car companies have chosen domestic chips. The reason is that aside from business considerations, considering safety and stability and cost control, the performance of domestic chips will not be discounted at all.

We do not deny that the beginning of my country's chip is late, but it is clear that the intelligent competition has just started. The competition of the car track in the future is like a marathon. Domestic chip suppliers have been running against time, and constantly break through the AEC-Q100 reliability certification, ISO26262 functional security product certification, and national secret certification.

In addition, domestic chips have reasons to rise. The United States has recently signed the "2022 Chip and Science Act", which requires the design and production of chips to be in the United States, and implement new export controls on EDA software. The impact of this series of operations on domestic chip practitioners is real.

During the conversation with chip practitioners, the reporter felt their helplessness, but they could feel their facing the realistic wisdom and perseverance. "The research and development and manufacturing of the domestic chip industry chain has gradually matured in repeated polishing" "We are trying to make cost control through localization to the extreme", "24 -hour residents provide services to them at any time" ... Just like these like these ... The chip practitioners firmly believe that domestic chips have no problems in the professionalism of technology, industrial chain, and employees. Under the polishing of time, domestic chips have no reason to be unsuccessful.

Daily Economic News

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