Under the background of "dual carbon", the century old automotive industry is undergoing tremendous changes, and new energy vehicles with the trend of "electrification, intelligence, and networking" are reshaping the industry pattern.

In the second half of the new energy vehicle market, the intelligent cockpit SoC is becoming a "hot spot" for automotive intelligence

Under the dual effects of policies and markets, China's new energy vehicles will once again achieve rapid growth in 2023. According to data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, China's production and sales of new energy vehicles reached 9.587 million and 9.495 million respectively last year, an increase of 35.8% and 37.9% year-on-year. The market share has reached 31.6%, which is 6 percentage points higher than the previous year; In terms of exports, driven by the acceleration of overseas layout by numerous OEMs, China's new energy vehicle exports reached 1.203 million units in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 77.6%. According to its forecast, the sales of new energy vehicles in China will reach 11.5 million units in 2024, an increase of about 21%, continuing to maintain a rapid development trend.

Source: China Association of Automobile Manufacturers

Shao Nan, Business Development Manager of Xinqing Technology, stated:

The definition of cars by consumers will evolve from a means of transportation to a third space, and new energy vehicles will fundamentally change the product form of traditional cars, transforming them from simple mobile tools to lifestyle partners. In the future, with the continuous development of electrification and intelligence of automobiles, this product will have more imaginative space, and the penetration rate will increase from 31% now to around 55% by 2025.

With the continuous development of new energy vehicles, the content and value of automotive chips will increase exponentially, driving the continuous expansion of the automotive semiconductor market. According to Yole's data, the automotive semiconductor market size in 2022 was $43 billion, and it is expected to maintain a compound annual growth rate of 11.9% over the next six years, reaching $84.3 billion by 2028.

Automotive semiconductors are mainly divided into four categories: control chips, sensor chips, power semiconductor chips, and storage chips, with control chips accounting for approximately 27.1% of them. With the continuous development of automotive intelligence, the demand for main control chips in the future market will continue to increase, and it is expected that the compound annual growth rate will reach 25% from 2022 to 2031. However, currently, the main control chips are mainly monopolized by domestic manufacturers, and the localization rate is still very low. For domestic chip manufacturers, there is a great potential for substitution in the future.

Shao Nan said.

Intelligent cars, intelligent cabins take the lead. The intelligent cockpit with richer functions and better experience has become the core selling point of product differentiation among major host manufacturers.

At present, various manufacturers have different definitions of intelligent cabins, but they can mainly be divided into sub components such as in car entertainment systems, driver information display systems, HUD, streaming rearview mirrors, driving recorders, and rear LCD displays. From the perspective of penetration rate, due to the low difficulty in implementing intelligent cabins, significant user experience, and the increasing duration of consumer car use, smartphone usage preferences are gradually shifting to the cabin. Therefore, intelligent cabins are currently receiving key market attention, and the penetration rate of new car intelligent cockpit configurations is rapidly increasing. According to JW Insight data, it is expected that by 2025, the penetration rates of intelligent configuration in global and Chinese car cabins will reach 59% and 78%, respectively. It is expected that by 2030, the global market size of intelligent car cabins will reach 68.1 billion US dollars, and the market size of intelligent car cabins in China will reach 166.3 billion yuan.

It is worth noting that the mainstream of traditional cabins is "instrument+central control dual screen", mainly controlled by MCU. But with the continuous development of automotive intelligence, the intelligent cockpit has gradually added functions such as co pilot entertainment, central rearview mirror, head up display, rear seat dual screen, and generative artificial intelligence. "One core multifunctional" has become the future trend of the form of main engine factory cockpit products, and control methods are gradually evolving from simple MCU to SoC with high integration and computing power. According to JW Insight's forecast, with major automakers pushing for higher computing power and higher intelligence SoCs, it is expected that the global cockpit SoC market size will reach 5.12 billion US dollars by 2025, with a CAGR of 20.2% in the past five years.

In terms of competitive landscape, the traditional in car entertainment chip market is basically monopolized by mainstream automotive chip giants such as NXP, TI, and Renesas. But with the advent of the era of intelligent connected vehicles, the screens in the cabin are getting larger, the resolution is getting higher, and the functions are becoming more and more diverse. The entire cabin market pattern is beginning to be restructured, and Qualcomm, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, and others are expanding their market share with their accumulation in the consumer electronics field.

Taking Qualcomm as an example, as early as 2014, Qualcomm released the Snapdragon 620A intelligent cockpit product with a process of 28nm. After years of development, its mainstream product has iterated to the 7nm SA8155P. According to its introduction, the product has eight cores, with a computing power of 8TOPS (i.e. 8 trillion operations per second), CPU performance of 80KDMIPS, and GPU performance of 1142GFLOPS. With its outstanding performance, this product has become a standard configuration for mainstream cockpit SoCs in mid to high end models. The models already equipped include NIO ET7, NIO ES8, NIO ES6, EC6, Xiaopeng P5, Ideal L9, Weima W6, Great Wall WEY All Railway, GAC Aion LX, Geely Star Yue L, Zhiji L7, etc., and have basically formed a monopoly position in the field of intelligent cockpit SoCs.

Shao Nan pointed out that with the continuous development of automotive electronic and electrical architecture technology, the traditional distributed architecture is evolving towards the current centralized architecture, and the intelligent cockpit domain and autonomous driving domain are the two most promising areas for development. We believe that by 2025, the penetration rate of intelligent cockpit SoC will reach 60%, and the penetration rate of L2/L3 level autonomous driving will also reach 50%. Domestic semiconductor manufacturers are expected to follow the development of domestic OEMs in this wave of new energy vehicles, breaking the market situation where high-end intelligent cockpit SoC has long been monopolized by overseas manufacturers such as Qualcomm.

Shipping volume exceeds 200000 pieces! Intelligent cockpit chip can benchmark against Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155

Founded in 2018, Xinqing Technology is committed to becoming a world leading provider of integrated solutions for automotive electronic chips. Since its establishment, the company has received billions of yuan in financing from well-known investment institutions such as FAW Group, Sequoia Capital, Haier Capital, and SMIC Juyuan.

With strong financial support, Xinqing Technology has chosen to start with the intelligent cockpit chip with the highest value and strongest experience in automobiles. After three years of research and development, the company successfully completed the production of China's first 7-nanometer automotive grade SoC chip, "Dragon Eagle One", in 2021, and completed mass production verification in 2022. It officially began large-scale shipments in 2023.

Xinqing Technology Longying No.1 Intelligent Cockpit SoC Chip

Source: Xinqing Technology

Specifically, Dragon Eagle One adopts a 7nm process technology, which has excellent performance and computing power. It integrates 87 layers of circuits, has 8.8 billion transistors, is equipped with an 8-core CPU (4 Cortex-A76 large cores and 4 Cortex-A55 small cores), a 14 core GPU, and an independent NPU with 8 TOPS, as well as a dual HiFi 5 DSP processor. The integer computing power can reach 90K and the floating-point computing power can reach 900G. In addition, the chip also has a powerful VPU, ISP, DPU, DSP cluster, as well as a matching high bandwidth and low latency LPDDR5 memory channel, which can smoothly provide comprehensive computing power support for functions and applications such as intelligent cockpit floating central control large screen, karaoke mode, esports space, online navigation, voice interaction, etc.

It is worth emphasizing that a single Dragon Eagle One can support an integrated cabin and parking solution, as well as access to 8MP forward facing camera data, and provide some ADAS assisted driving functions. Compared with the traditional cabin+parking+ADAS solution, the cost of a single vehicle can be saved by about 700-1000 yuan, making it highly competitive in the market.

Shao Nan stated that the code name of Longying No.1 product is SE1000, and the product is mainly positioned as an intelligent cockpit multimedia processor for mid to high end cars. Currently, it is the only 7nm intelligent cockpit SoC chip mass-produced in China. In addition to leading the market in performance, the Longying No.1 SE1000 chip is embedded with a safety island function in terms of safety, integrating ASIL-B safety display, and adopting a dual redundant interlocking architecture. It supports national security algorithms such as SM2, SM3, and SM4. It can be said that this chip can achieve the full process of chip to vehicle vehicle reliability assurance, with extremely high safety and stability. In addition, the chip can also achieve a multi-dimensional and multi perspective human-computer interaction experience, and provide complete support for various auxiliary driving functions, providing comprehensive computing power support for the application of intelligent cabins, which will meet the needs of global market automotive enterprise users.

Main product features of Xinqing Technology

Source of information: Xinqing Technology

According to Xinqing Technology, the Dragon Eagle One directly targets Qualcomm's flagship intelligent cockpit product Snapdragon 8155. Compared with this product, Longying No.1 has core competitive advantages in terms of built-in high-performance embedded AI neural network processing units, new generation multi-core graphics processing units, and a high security level "safety island" design. This also means that China's high-end advanced processes and high computing power automotive chips have officially broken the monopoly of overseas manufacturers, providing Chinese car companies with a new choice.

After the production of the Lynk&Co 08 model, the models already delivered include the Lynk&Co 06 EM-P, Ruilan 7, and others. It should be emphasized that during the first three months of the launch of Lynk&Co 08, sales continued to climb, and in the third month, it even surpassed the 10000 vehicle mark. Based on this performance, the actual shipment volume of Dragon Eagle One has exceeded 200000 pieces as of the end of December 2023.

Shao Nan pointed out that Xinqing Technology is increasing its cooperation with car manufacturers and Tier1. In addition to the delivered Lynk&Co 08, Lynk&Co 06 EM-P, and Ruilan 7 models, we are also collaborating with the world's largest cockpit domain control Tier1 manufacturer, Wistron, to develop a SmartCore based on the Dragon Eagle 1? The cockpit domain controller also made its debut at the Weishitong booth at the Shanghai Auto Show in April 2023. As of now, the company has obtained over 20 designated models from mainstream car manufacturers such as Geely and FAW. Next, the Longying No.1 will be gradually launched in multiple models launched this year, and the high-end upgrade time of domestic substitution has arrived.

Some ecological partners of Xinqing Technology

Source: Xinqing Technology

After achieving significant breakthroughs in the field of intelligent cockpit, Xinqing Technology is orderly promoting research and development work around core chips such as intelligent cockpit chips, autonomous driving chips, and onboard central processing units required for the next generation of automotive electronic and electrical architecture.

In 2024, Core Engine Technology will launch the advanced autopilot chip AD1000, which is directly benchmarking the international advanced products. It also uses the 7nm process, and the AI computing power will reach 256TOPS, supporting the L2+to L5 level auto drive system. In the future, the company will continue to support the development of automotive intelligence with chip underlying technology. While committed to becoming a world leading supplier of automotive electronic chip sorting solutions, it will also enable everyone to experience the joy of driving a car.

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