New Energy Vehicles (NEVs) in China

tphuang said:

Earlier today, I posted this news on Semiconductor thread

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I think it is a big news in many ways. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first big order that a Chinese chipmaker has won from a foreign automaker for cars serving outside of the Chinese markets. It's a large order too. This is for over 2.5 million cars over the space of 4 years. We've talked about how China is cornering the European market in EV batteries. Now, it looks to me that they may be on their way to achieving something similar in auto chips. And, they are doing it stealthily because America is too focused on the leading edge chip market.

Initially, companies like Infineon and ST Microelectronics were the largest in the Chinese market. With the insane demand for NEVs in China, the wait time for power chip got too long. As a result of this, Chinese chipmakers have made major plans in fab expansion in the past couple of years. This link has some good charts on just how much they are expanding in IGBT market. With this, the domestic chipmakers become so good at this process that they also support oversea customers. And with the high energy prices that Infineon and ST are likely to face in the next year, it would be hard to not see Chinese chipmakers make even more in-road over the next couple of years. It has come just at the right time as NEV demand in China is skyrocketing.

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According to this, IGBT market market is adding 60k wpm in 2022. Chinese chip makers account for 2/3 of that and CRRC expects to add 10k. This link below has a chart (which takes too much space, so I'm not attaching it here) which shows IGBT capacity for Chinese players

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CRRC will be producing 30k 8-inch wpm by end of this year and that's suppose to be enough for 1.1 million IGBT modules in 2022. I'm not sure if that chart is for just the Chinese market or for world wide market, but it shows Infineon losing market share there from 2021 to 2022 to the point where CRRC will have the largest market share at 14%. It looks quite different from here New Energy Vehicles (NEVs) in China

Anyways, the expansion is the meaningful part. The biggest Chinese players are BYD, CRRC and Starpower. Silan is getting a lot bigger this year. Starpower is fabless and have its chips produced by Huahong Grace

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and also Shanghai GTA and SMIC Shaoxing.

If you look at that table of 2022 production levels, you can see how much the Chinese chipmakers are producing this year. Silan is going from 0 to 800k modules in 1 year due to orders from BYD. BYD itself is still waiting for its fabs to ramp up. BYD itself is going from 1 fab in 2021 to 3 fabs this year. And, the Jinan fab will have 3 phases of expansion and eventually producing 12-inch wafers.

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Looks like BYD ordered from all the major players back in 2021 when it was ramping up its auto. With its chip production probably 4x/5x over the next few years, it probably will be a net seller of IGBTs/SiCs in a few year.

CRRC produces chips for FAW, GAC, Dongfeng, Neta and Chang'An.

Click to expand...

According to certain "industry experts" the power management chips at micron level are stone age and backwards. meanwhile there's 3 month wait time to buy a car in certain shining countries.

tphuang said:

Earlier today, I posted this news on Semiconductor thread

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

I think it is a big news in many ways. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first big order that a Chinese chipmaker has won from a foreign automaker for cars serving outside of the Chinese markets. It's a large order too. This is for over 2.5 million cars over the space of 4 years. We've talked about how China is cornering the European market in EV batteries. Now, it looks to me that they may be on their way to achieving something similar in auto chips. And, they are doing it stealthily because America is too focused on the leading edge chip market.

Initially, companies like Infineon and ST Microelectronics were the largest in the Chinese market. With the insane demand for NEVs in China, the wait time for power chip got too long. As a result of this, Chinese chipmakers have made major plans in fab expansion in the past couple of years. This link has some good charts on just how much they are expanding in IGBT market. With this, the domestic chipmakers become so good at this process that they also support oversea customers. And with the high energy prices that Infineon and ST are likely to face in the next year, it would be hard to not see Chinese chipmakers make even more in-road over the next couple of years. It has come just at the right time as NEV demand in China is skyrocketing.

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According to this, IGBT market market is adding 60k wpm in 2022. Chinese chip makers account for 2/3 of that and CRRC expects to add 10k. This link below has a chart (which takes too much space, so I'm not attaching it here) which shows IGBT capacity for Chinese players

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

CRRC will be producing 30k 8-inch wpm by end of this year and that's suppose to be enough for 1.1 million IGBT modules in 2022. I'm not sure if that chart is for just the Chinese market or for world wide market, but it shows Infineon losing market share there from 2021 to 2022 to the point where CRRC will have the largest market share at 14%. It looks quite different from here New Energy Vehicles (NEVs) in China

Anyways, the expansion is the meaningful part. The biggest Chinese players are BYD, CRRC and Starpower. Silan is getting a lot bigger this year. Starpower is fabless and have its chips produced by Huahong Grace

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

and also Shanghai GTA and SMIC Shaoxing.

If you look at that table of 2022 production levels, you can see how much the Chinese chipmakers are producing this year. Silan is going from 0 to 800k modules in 1 year due to orders from BYD. BYD itself is still waiting for its fabs to ramp up. BYD itself is going from 1 fab in 2021 to 3 fabs this year. And, the Jinan fab will have 3 phases of expansion and eventually producing 12-inch wafers.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Looks like BYD ordered from all the major players back in 2021 when it was ramping up its auto. With its chip production probably 4x/5x over the next few years, it probably will be a net seller of IGBTs/SiCs in a few year.

CRRC produces chips for FAW, GAC, Dongfeng, Neta and Chang'An.

Click to expand...

Is China self-sufficient in IGBT for autos?

China Railway will allow EVs to be shipped to Europe from China by rail from Oct 1st.

Nio will launch ET7, ET5, and ES7 in Europe on October 7.

ET7:



ET5:

ES7:



The Electric Viking likes ES7:

The Electric Viking's take on Xpeng G9:

broadsword said:

Is China self-sufficient in IGBT for autos?

Click to expand...

not at the moment, but probably in another year. Although, I don't really expect to make all of their own IGBTs or SICs, since some of the foreign JVs and NIO/XPeng will keep buying foreign ones that are either produced in China or bought directly. And some of the domestic chipmakers will export broad.

FairAndUnbiased said:

According to certain "industry experts" the power management chips at micron level are stone age and backwards. meanwhile there's 3 month wait time to buy a car in certain shining countries.

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Click to expand...

power chips are going to be quite dominated by Chinese chipmakers. I'm impressed at how much capacity BYD, CRRC, Silan and Huahong/StarPower all added in such a shower time. I think the current energy crisis in Europe will devastate the minimal chipmaking ability they still have.

Why is that SMIC is having a meeting in Chongqing with the local government, Bosch China and ST China? I think they are going to build a large fab there to manufacture chips for Bosch and STMicro. The cost of manufacturing in Europe is likely to be very high and SMIC can probably get a new fab up and producing power chips by end of 2023. As soon as China reaches that technology level, it's going to be the most efficient manufacturer of that technology.

So, I anticipate that Chinese chipmakers will be producing power chips for the European automakers. Could be as part of JV between Infineon, ST, Bosch and SMIC, Huahong or GTA Semiconductor. Or it could just be directly through CRRC, StarPower and BYD.

I see China dominating power chips and electric motor very soon. Europe will be too distracted by social unrest and economic troubles to do anything about. America will produce enough to supply domestic players, but there is not enough investment in this area.

The other part that got my attention yesterday was this Bosch investment in Cambricon SingGo, which is the auto division of Cambricon. SingGo has already received investment from SAIC, NIO and CATL.

Cambricon is more well known for its AI server chips, but it came out with auto CPUs a while back that is quite competitive. They have a lower end chip SD5223 with 16 TOPS for less expensive cars and a higher end SD5226 with over 400 TOPS (using 7 nm process) for expensive smart driving cars. Both of these would be top of the market when they come out
So, I wonder if someone like Bosch is getting intrigues by Cambricon auto chips and are looking to build their own super computer for autonomous driving.

As a refresher course, NIO is building a new Adam supercomputer with 4 Nvidia Orin chips (254 TOPS each) that will give over 1000 TOPS of processing power, which is enough for L4 Driving. As a comparison, Tesla cars currently have 2 72 TOPS chips on model Y.
As a whole, if Europe doesn't have chip design house capable of designing modern AI chips, they could either go for American or Chinese chip design houses. Given Qualcomm and Nvidia's history in this space, you'd think they would go build their super computer using American chips. It would be a huge jolt for Chinese auto AI chip industry if the European automakers/suppliers pick Chinese firms.

Here are the domestic players:
First Cambricon - already discussed the chips
FAW will be using them

Black Sesame - has A1000 Pro with 106 TOPS (with 16 nm TSMC process) and A1000L with 16 TOPS (16 nm TSMC process)
- really gets me nervous that they are touting using Blackberry QNX as its platform.
- it has gotten investment from Bosch group as early as 2018 and got additional investment from Bosch's Boyuan Capital fund this year
JAC will be using them on some of its models

Horizon Robotics - this is the big one. Journey 3 has 5 TOPS (using TSMC 16 nm technology).
- Journey 5 has 96 TOPS, 5P has 128 TOPS using TSMC 16 nm technology
- Journey 6 will apparently be released in 2023 with over 400 TOPS using TSMC 7 nm technology
- Partners include BYD, Audi, Bosch, SAIC, GAC motor, Hongqi, Chery, Li Auto, ChangAn
When Journey 5 was first announced, Horizon said

If car companies use multiple chips to build autonomous driving domain controllers, they can reach a maximum of 1,024 TOPS, which can support L4 autonomous driving, the company said. Several autonomous driving Tier 1 suppliers have already released domain controllers based on the Journey 5 chip, and Horizon expects them to build Horizon Matrix SuperDrive full-scene, whole-vehicle intelligence solutions based on the chip.

Click to expand...

BYD announced it will use them on some car models in 2023.
SAIC said it will use Journey 5 on some car models in 2023
NIO was said to be evaluating journey 5 for its sub brand models
Li Auto L1 have been using Journey 3 since 2021 and L8 will be using Journey 5
Neta will be using them
FAW/Hongqi will be using them

So Horizon really has majority of the market right now. It drives me crazy to read articles that says China has no alternatives to Nvidia Orin, when there clearly are such alternatives. Domestic automakers are using them. I'd be surprised if foreign JVs don't start using them more.

It actually also drives me crazy to see Geely/Zeekr jump on to the new Nvidia Thor chip in 2025, when Horizon and other players might have something comparable by that time.

As of now, it seems like the premium brand of BYD and NIO still considers Nvidia Orin to be more capable than Journey 5, so the more premium cars are using that. The less premium cars will be using Journey 5. Even so, that seems like a barrier that will be crossed in the next couple of years.

There is also BYD's own chip making project.
It's not clear to me if BYD is actually designing its own chips or will be using working with someone else to design its chips. At the end of the day, BYD is the only one that really matters here. It seems like they are taking 3 paths of Nvidia, Horizon and self. Eventually, I expect them to be a major player here. XPeng picking Orin isn't going to matter if they keep losing money at this pace.

More new factory from BYD
I have honestly never heard of this place before. Then again, I'm not from Anhui. BYD is building a large plant at Fuyang! It will invested 10 billion RMB in a new factory that will produce NEV parts/components for 1 million cars. It will build a precision work centers, precision injection molding parts for motors, wheel speed lines, wheel hub bearings, seat cover and other parts. It will employ over 10000 people. Again, BYD will easily be the largest private employer in a 4th or maybe even 5th tier city.

You may remember in end of June, BYD started producing cars at its Hefei plant. That's not its only Anhui province endeavor in the past few months. More recently, it signed a JV with JAC Motors, Ankai Auto and Zhezhu grouop for a new battery plant Anhui.
I don't think this is related to that JV.
I do think this will make BYD the largest and most influential private company in Anhui, which is actually quite the automobile powerhouse in China.