Geely's self-developed 7nm chip will be mass-produced next year! The wave of car companies making cores has been unstoppable
Geely self-developed 7nm chip
On the last day of October, Geely Automobile announced the "Smart Geely 2025" strategy, which is expected to invest 150 billion yuan in research and development funds in the next five years, and announced that the self-developed 7nm smart cockpit chip SE1000 will soon be mass-produced.

It is understood that SE1000 is self-developed by Xinqing Technology, with a scale of up to 8.8 billion transistors and an area of ​​only 83 square millimeters. After completing the vehicle certification, it will be mass-produced next year. Geely also stated that SE1000 will become China's first automotive-grade SoC chip with a 7nm process.

Leap into the top five of domestic enterprises' R&D investment, and realize "full-stack self-research" in chips

In the Smart Geely 2025 strategy, the core goal is to set the R&D investment in the next five years at 150 billion yuan, that is, at least 30 billion yuan per year on average. What is this concept?
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According to data released by the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce in September this year, in the 2021 R&D investment ranking of Chinese enterprises, apart from the first-ranked Huawei R&D investment exceeding 140 billion, and the second-ranking Ali invested 57.2 billion, the annual investment of 3 to 5 R&D investment is at the level of more than 30 billion. Geely has already been the company with the highest R&D investment in the domestic automotive field. If it maintains an average R&D investment of 30 billion yuan in the next five years, it is expected to jump to the top five of domestic R&D investment.

Some people may think that Geely Group has a wide range of business, including multiple sub-brands, satellite networking, and even previously announced that it will enter the mobile phone business, etc. Actually, the actual R&D expenses for each part are not much. However, in the "Nine Longwan Actions" proposed by Geely at the press conference, the five-year R&D investment of 150 billion yuan was put first, and the realization of "autonomous driving full-stack self-research" was put in the second position.

Among them, the focus of "autonomous driving full stack self-research" is what Geely calls "one network and three systems". It means to build an end-to-end self-research system and ecological alliance around chips, software operating systems, data and satellite networks to drive the experience of autonomous driving and smart cockpits.

The position occupied by chips is unquestionable. Geely has also frequently invested in chips, power semiconductors and other upstream areas of the automotive industry in the past two years. As for the design of SoC chips for entering automobiles, Geely invested in Ekatong as early as 2016. Geely is the second car company in the world to deploy SoC chips for automobiles after Tesla.

In October last year, Geely Holding Group’s strategic investment Ekatong Technology (renamed Huanfu Technology in August) and Arm China jointly funded the establishment of Xinqing Technology. R&D and mass production plan.
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Source: Enterprise Check

However, when the editor checked the industry and commerce information, he found that on July 16 this year, after Xinqing Technology made an investor change, Yikatong disappeared from the list and was replaced by Mobile & Magic Limited, a Hong Kong registered company under the Geely Holding Group. Considering that Geely Automobile is listed on the Hong Kong stock market, this operation is also reasonable.

In addition to the self-developed 7nm smart cockpit chip SE1000, which will be mass-produced next year, Geely also revealed several important information: From 2024 to 2025, Geely will successively launch 5nm in-vehicle integrated supercomputing platform chips, as well as high computing power automation. The driving chip has a computing power of up to 256 TOPS, which can meet the needs of L3 autonomous driving.

In fact, as early as March this year, Xinqing Technology has actually announced that it will launch a 7nm automotive-grade smart cockpit chip as soon as the end of next year, and will be produced by TSMC. CEO Wang Kai also revealed in June this year that Xinqing Technology plans to launch a high-end autonomous driving chip AD1000. The single-chip computing power meets the requirements of ADAS L3+. It is expected to be commercially available in 2024. This information is basically consistent with the new strategy announced by Geely. Perhaps this strategy conference can be understood as Geely's strong endorsement for the chip industry it invests.

The layout of car chips by car companies is already a trend

The earliest domestic car company to deploy semiconductor chips is undoubtedly BYD. As early as 2005, BYD began to form an IGBT research and development team. In 2009, it launched the first automotive-grade IGBT 1.0 technology. In 2012, the IGBT 2.0 was successfully developed. In 2018, the IGBT 4.0 product launched by it was characterized by current output, comprehensive loss and temperature cycle life. Many other key indicators have surpassed the products of mainstream companies such as Infineon, and the independent 32-bit automotive-grade MCU has made BYD less affected by the wave of car core shortage.

However, BYD has no first-mover advantage in areas such as autonomous driving and smart cockpits. Due to the rise of smart cars and autonomous driving in recent years, the demand for high-computing power chips in automobiles has become particularly prominent. However, it is precisely because the demand has only become prominent in recent years that the layout of car companies is relatively late, generally starting in the last two or three years.

Tesla, which has an earlier layout on high computing power chips, launched FSD chips in 2019, manufactured using Samsung's 14nm process, passed AEC-Q100 vehicle certification, and has a single chip of 72TOPS computing power.

As for domestic car companies, most of them use strategic investment and other methods to deeply bind domestic head chip companies to deploy car chips. On February 8 this year, Great Wall Motor announced that the company has completed its strategic investment in Beijing Horizon Robotics Technology R&D Co., Ltd. ("Horizon" for short). In addition to its strategic investment in Horizon, Great Wall Motors also signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement with Horizon, focusing on advanced assisted driving (ADAS), high-level autonomous driving and smart cockpits, jointly exploring automotive smart technology and developing market-leading smart cars Products, rapid deployment of intelligent core technologies such as autonomous driving and intelligent networking, accelerate the development and mass production of smart cars.

Last week, SAIC Lingshu also signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Horizon to carry out in-depth exchanges and cooperation in related aspects of on-board chips and on-board operating systems, and jointly explore a new generation of automotive digital architecture and intelligent driving computing platform solutions. It is understood that SAIC Lingshu was established in May 2020. In July this year, Lingshu "Galaxy Full Stack 3.0" was approved by SAIC Motor, focusing on the three-tier core architecture of operating systems, hardware solutions, and digital ecology.

In terms of new car-building forces, NIO set up the Smart Hardware hardware team in 2020 and announced that it will start self-developing self-driving chips; Xiaopeng Motors also reported in April this year that it has launched an autonomous driving chip project in China and the United States at the same time. The team size is about 10 people, and it is expected to be taped out at the end of this year or early next year.