Recently, many people who want to buy cars have encountered the problem of delayed delivery. The delay in the delivery of new cars at 4S stores is mainly due to the global shortage of automotive chips.
From the perspective of application, all kinds of chips are indispensable for cars, ranging from tire pressure monitoring system tmps and camera to vehicle controller and automatic driving domain controller. It can be said that the intelligence of automobile is the intelligence of chip.
If the mobile phone chip is the "brain" of the mobile phone, then the car chip is also the brain of the car. Among them, automotive chips can be mainly divided into three categories: "function chips", "power semiconductors" and "sensors".
Function chip (MCU) is also known as "micro control unit". If the electronic control system, information entertainment system, powertrain system, vehicle motion system and other system functions in the car want to operate normally, they all need this type of function chip to be realized. At present, the most popular "auto drive system" is also inseparable from function chip.
Automotive power semiconductors are mainly used in automotive power control system, lighting system, fuel injection, chassis safety and other systems, among which traditional fuel vehicles generally use them in the fields of startup and power generation, safety and so on; New energy vehicles need a large number of power semiconductors to meet the frequent voltage conversion needs of vehicles. In addition, many parts of electric vehicles also need the blessing of power semiconductors.
Automobile sensor is the input device of automobile computer system. Its function is to convert the information of various working conditions in automobile operation, such as vehicle speed, temperature of various media, engine operating conditions, etc., into electrical signals and send them to the computer, so that the automobile is in the best working state. For example, oxygen sensor, tire pressure sensor, water temperature sensor, electronic accelerator pedal position sensor, etc.
To sum up, automotive chips are very important for a car. Among the three types of functional chips, power semiconductors and sensors, sensors have the smallest market share. Without sensors, cars can't even step on the accelerator. Now, I believe you can understand why cars can't be built without chips.
How many electronic components does a car need?
In the past, about 500-600 chips were generally needed to manufacture a traditional car. With the continuous development of the automotive industry, today's cars are gradually changing from mechanical to electronic, and cars are becoming more and more intelligent, so the number of chips needed is naturally more. It is understood that in 2021, the average number of chips required for each vehicle has reached more than 1000.
In addition to traditional cars, new energy vehicles are the "big" of chips. This kind of car requires a large number of DC-AC inverters, transformers, converters and other components, and the demand for IGBT, MOSFET, diode and other semiconductor devices has also increased significantly. A better new energy vehicle may need about 2000 chips, which is very amazing.
At present, the chip scale of the global semiconductor industry is between us $300billion and US $400billion. Among them, automotive chips are about $40billion, accounting for less than 10%, which will obviously cause a weak situation for car companies when scheduling production or competing for orders.
From the perspective of technical requirements, vehicle specification level chips really deter most chip enterprises. The iteration of consumer electronics chip technology is very fast, and the car specification chip is almost the technology of more than a decade ago, but although the technology is "outdated", the threshold has not been reduced. On the contrary, the requirements for performance indicators, service life, reliability, safety and quality consistency of vehicle specification chips are unmatched by consumer electronics chips.
Compared with consumer chips and general industrial chips, the working environment of automotive chips is even worse: the temperature range can be wide to -40 ℃ ~155 ℃, high vibration, much dust, electromagnetic interference, etc. Due to personal safety issues, automotive chips have higher requirements for reliability and safety, with a general design life of 15 years or 200000 kilometers. "Vehicle specification level" chips need to go through a rigorous certification process, including reliability standard aec-q100, quality management standard iso/ts 16949, functional safety standard iso26262, etc.
The high standards, strict requirements and long cycle of vehicle specification chips have raised the entry threshold again and again, which directly leads to the fact that only chip enterprises with strong comprehensive ability or vertical integration ability and the ability to give full play to the scale advantage can include vehicle specification chips in the production list. Looking at the world, there are only a few such vehicle specification chip enterprises, such as NXP, Infineon, Siemens and so on. There are too many and too few, which is another reason why the supply of automotive chips exceeds the demand.