Standards for automotive-grade chips
AEC Q100 Requirements for Active Devices
AEC Q200 Requirements for Passive Device Components
The difference between automotive-grade chips and mobile phone chips
1. The typical lifespan of a vehicle is over ten years, and the lifespan of automotive-grade chips is much longer than that of a mobile phone, which typically lasts four to five years.
2. Automotive-grade chips typically need to withstand temperatures between -40°C and 150°C, while mobile phone chips only need to meet the operating environment requirements of 0°C to 70°C.
3. Automotive-grade chips are much safer than mobile phone chips, including in terms of functional safety and information security. Automotive chips have more stringent data verification to prevent potential safety hazards.
Classification of automotive-grade chips
Based on function, automotive-grade chips are divided into control, power, sensor and other categories; currently, most of the major chip manufacturers are from foreign companies.
Control chips include AI chips and MCU (microcontroller) chips. The automotive-grade chips we often talk about are more often AI chips, which are system-level SOC chips and have the most powerful performance.
China has become the world's largest automobile market, and the trends of electrification and intelligentization have driven a significant increase in the number of automotive chips. Domestic production of automotive-grade chips has already achieved a certain scale. However, domestically produced automotive-grade chips still face challenges such as small-scale application in vehicles, long automotive-grade certification cycles, low added value of technology, and high dependence on upstream industries.
Drawing on the development experience of China's consumer electronics industry and the construction experience of the automotive-grade chip industry chain in Japan and South Korea, focusing on solving the above-mentioned problems through industrial support policies is one of the powerful ways to increase the localization rate of automotive-grade chips and enhance the self-controllability of the automotive industry chain and supply chain. Relying solely on market forces is unlikely to drive the localization of automotive-grade chips; a strategy needs to be formed that is led by the government, with the participation of vehicle manufacturers, and focuses on providing key support to leading chip companies.
