Friends who pay attention to CES 2024 during this time, under the leadership of various media teachers, should also see a variety of application innovation dazed, but in fact, for cars, many technology applications on the 2024 CES show are children in terms of the domestic extremely inscroll car market. So what are the autos going to see in Las Vegas?

Since many of the automotive applications on show at CES are small children for us, is our auto industry great? Of course, we must admit that our manufacturing is powerful, our hard-working and overtime spirit, after the end of the infrastructure mania must create a frenzy, but the CES track is not 1-100 manufacturing, but 0-1 innovation. Therefore, we look at the innovative application and the underlying innovative technology. Only by obtaining these two innovations can we get rid of the inner scroll and make our products and businesses have differentiation and highlight premium.

As for the application of innovation, this article will not repeat, each media teacher's manuscript and video can fill your eyes, this article will write about the underlying innovation technology - chip.

The chip has always been the heart of modern industry and the cornerstone of information technology, and the electrification and intelligence of automobiles are also inseparable from the underlying technical support and innovation and development of the chip. Whether it is IGBT, SiC, GaN or intelligent MCU and SoC, it has always been an important promotion factor to promote the development of automotive electrification and intelligence.

At this CES 2024, we also see that Intel, the PC chip giant that always has Intel Inside, has made a big move in the Automotive chip, *Automotive Chiplet Platform, to help everyone customize the chip; AMD automotive grade Versal and Ryzen chips into the car intelligent driving and cockpit; Qualcomm and Nvidia high-performance central computing platforms Snapdragon ride flex and thor enable boarding schedules; Texas Instruments, Renesas, NXP and others are all introducing new chip technology.

So this article will explore what kind of chip products CES 2024 chip leaders bring? How will smart cars be transformed?

The central computing chip of Qualcomm Nvidia

Intel introduces Chiplet chip platform

AMD is trying to boost its competitiveness and push into automotive chips

TI replaces complex systems with a single chip

Other chips

The central computing chip of Qualcomm Nvidia

Nvidia and Qualcomm are the undisputed leaders in smart car chips, one in high-performance smart driving, the other in smart cockpit. However, both sides have found a consensus that the core chips of future smart cars will be integrated into a central computing chip just like computers and mobile phones. So in fact, in last year's CES, both sides successively launched their own central computing chips, and this CES both further announced the progress of their central computing chips.

NVIDIA DRIVE Thor, which provides up to 2000 TFLOP of high-performance computing power, integrates a wide range of automotive intelligence capabilities into a single AI computing platform, providing autonomous driving, self-parking, driver and passenger monitoring, and an AI cockpit.

NVIDIA's NVIDIA DRIVE Thor is a heterogeneous blend of "Hopper" architecture Gpus on a chip that handles machine learning workloads at the core of self-driving cars. In addition, heterogeneous "Grace" CPU based on high-performance "Poseidon" core of Arm is used to process various scenarios and processes.

Ideo will be one of the first cars to use NVIDIA DRIVE Thor, a central on-board computing chip, and will probably be available in 25 years. Of course, what the European and American chip giants do well is to provide a supporting development tool chain to help get started quickly. This time, the central computing chip Thor and Orin use the same Drive software development kit (SDK). Application companies like Ideal can quickly port their past software development to the new platform.

Of course, Nvidia also has an AI package for cars, which we wrote last year in "2023CES- What's Nvidia announcing for cars?" It's described in detail.

As for Qualcomm's central compute chip Snapdragon Ride Flex, Qualcomm and Bosch jointly unveiled at CES 2024 a central in-vehicle compute unit capable of running infotainment and smart driving functions on a single system-on-chip (SoC). This is Qualcomm Computing's counterattack to NVIDIA. Indicates that Qualcomm Snapdragon Ride Flex is starting to be ready and has been integrated into T1. * The Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC is now available in samples and production is expected to begin in 2024.

Nvidia is the fried chicken of the popular AI. In 2023, the revenue data has been nearly $10 billion away from the original Qualcomm. Qualcomm's automotive business accounts for a higher proportion, and Nvidia has listed the new AI business. So at CES, Nvidia has more AI infrastructure computing power facilities and services to promote, Qualcomm more with its communication strength to empower the Internet of everything.

According to the information of the two exhibitions at 2024 CES, it can be known that the central computing unit is the research and development project of various forward-looking Oems or T1, so it can be predicted that there will be another wave of publicity of the electronic and electrical architecture of automotive central computing around 2025.

Intel introduces Chiplet chip platform for automotive

At CES 2024, Intel showed off its * automotive SDV SoC chip with up to 12 heterogeneous cores, allowing for multiple operating systems. Support applications of the current hot GPT generative AI, electronic rear-view mirrors, HD video conference calls, and computer games, all of which work seamlessly together. Geely's Polar Krypton cars will be equipped with the chip starting in 2024.

In addition, Intel also has a strategic acquisition of Silicon Mobility, which is a company that provides motor and charge and discharge conversion and invert control chips. Its advantages compared with other current similar chips are that it provides control chips for hybrid architecture heterogeneous processing platforms. By combining a central processing unit (CPU) with Flexible Logic Units (FLU), Digital Signal Processing (DSP) accelerators, and math coprocessors, Silicon Mobility achieves reduced power module parts, lower losses, and smaller size and power density ratios.

Intel also announced the launch of a car-grade small chip platform based on the chiplet technology (What a chiplet is click on "New Hope for Smart Car Chips in China -Chiplet"), The connections between the different chips are based on Intel's Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express, an open standard for interconnect between chips.

To ensure compliance with automotive regulatory requirements, Intel has partnered with renowned research and development center imec to ensure that its advanced small chip packaging technology meets the stringent quality and reliability standards required for automotive applications.

This open small chip platform concept supports a mix-and-match approach where Oems can select different small chips or modular semiconductor components and combine them on a single packaged SoC to meet specific needs or performance requirements. This approach could help automotive chips achieve faster, more cost-effective development cycles, and the ability to upgrade and adjust the vehicle's computing power over time without a complete redesign.

The main engine factory and the head intelligent supplier make the core, is also a hot thing in recent years, the chip factory knows the chip know how, but their know why and what demand is from the main engine factory and the head intelligent supplier, so many main engine factory and the head intelligent supplier are ready to make the chip, However, making chips is also a thing similar to making cars. The investment threshold of streaming chips is high, and the shipment guarantee is needed to support long cycle survival, so as to ensure the correct planning path at the beginning. So for new entrants is a high risk positive business.

Intel's similar open small chip architecture offers manufacturers the flexibility to develop custom solutions at a fraction of the cost and time of a fully custom SoC, and the flexibility to adjust the solution in the future. Therefore, this Chiplet-based chip platform architecture has the opportunity to disrupt the traditional automotive supply chain in the future.

In fact, Chiplet technology is very hot in China, and many people are looking at it. With chip open IP RISC-V(what is RISC-V? Click the previous article "New Opportunities for RISC-V automotive Electronics"), there are indeed many opportunities and possibilities in the future.

It is estimated that many Chinese automobile people will think that Intel Intel as a global chip giant is only now entering the automobile market, in fact, in 1976, Intel planned to enter the automobile engine controller market. In 2012, inte's Atom was introduced into the entertainment car system with Japanese and American companies. Of course, the decline of Atom in the car is also the result of Intel losing to Arm in the whole mobile Internet chip, and the car is just a branch of the mobile Internet.

And now the rise of smart cars is once again spurring chip giant Intel's automotive chip ambitions.

AMD is trying to boost its competitiveness and push into automotive chips

At CES 2024, PC chip giant AMD also took a breakthrough step into the future of automotive technology by unveiling its latest processor that redefines the driving experience. The US chip giant took the stage to introduce the Versal AI Edge XA adaptive system-on-chip (SoC) and Ryzen embedded V2000A series processors, both pushing the boundaries and expanding its capabilities in automotive applications.

Versal AI Edge XA, a series of heterogeneous SoCs based on 7nm process, combines a general purpose CPU, DSP, and FPGA programmable logic core, while building in an AI compute engine and other hardened IP. AI chips for forward cameras, in-vehicle surveillance, LiDAR, 4D radar, look-around, autonomous parking, and autonomous driving processing. Smaller sizes with 20k LUTs to larger sizes with 521k LUTs. They also vary in speed, from 5 TOPs to the super-fast 171 TOPs, with a power of roughly 10-75w. It will be available in the second half of 2024.

Ryzen V2000A is an x86 on-board entertainment soc built with 7nm technology. It is equipped with "Zen 2" core and AMD Radeon Vega 7 graphics card, enhanced security features and automotive software support through hypervisor. There is also support for automotive Linux and Android automotive. This chip is currently disclosed Geely's Ecarx billion Gatong will be used, and the differentiation he creates will be the game cockpit.

In terms of intelligent driving, AMD is still a relatively small player in the automotive market. The Versal XA launched this time is actually the automotive version of the Xilinx Versal AI series. From the performance point of view, it mainly supports distributed applications, that is, relatively small computing power processing of a single sensor. For example, a single camera, lidar, radar, etc. are then transmitted to a central controller. It can be seen that AMD is in urgent need of entering this market.

On the other hand, its slightly larger computing power can support the integration into the domain controller, so as to realize AI type processing, and then transmit to other processors with higher security and real-time performance to process the output to the actuator.

AMD's cockpit system chip, used to run dashboard displays and other "infotainment" systems, is the core of Tesla's cockpit, which will sell up to 1.8 million units in 2023, but it is rarely used by other companies except Tesla, after all, the engineering threshold should be a higher level than Qualcomm and other companies.

So AMD is trying to improve its competitiveness, find differentiation, and attack automotive chips.

TI replaces complex systems with a single chip

The dark horse of intelligent driving chip in 2023 is TI's TDA4. Dji and other enterprises use this cheap and low computing power chip to make the L2++ intelligent driving function that only Nvidia with large computing power can make. So what TI has been doing is not high-performance, high-value things, TI is good at using cheap and universal things to change from the bottom, replacing complex systems with a single chip. This CES is no exception, TI introduced two more universal chips.

AWR2544 radar chip, traditional radar sensor chip adopts distributed signal processing method, radar processing a large amount of data and send the information to the ADAS Electronic Control Unit (ECU), AWR2544 uses light processing sensor data and input this information into the central ECU. It can help advanced ADAS and sensor fusion algorithms to provide better performance. In addition, this chip uses a Launchon-package (LOP), which means that the antenna can be directly installed on the same PCB, thus reducing the space of traditional radar by more than 30%. If you have seen our previous article "Good Answer: Tesla HW4.0 4D millimeter Wave Radar shared that the size of the radar is also very important to the flexibility of the car arrangement.

DRV3901-Q1 hot fuse driver and DRV3946-Q1 contactor driver chips, in fact, you can understand him as the intelligent fuse, which is also the efuse promoted by Tesla. Their advantages are faster fusing times than fusing fuses, programmable peak and hold current ensure that contacters can be turned on/off quickly and safely, providing a calibrated, faster fusing, and replaceable, more intelligently connected fuse system for electrical and electronic architecture power systems.

TI's chips may not directly add new cool features to vehicle systems, but the advantages of single-chip solutions can make automotive electronics design more ubiquitous and convenient. These chips can be used in new whole-vehicle electronic and electrical architectures to improve driver safety, vehicle responsiveness, and the intelligence of next-generation electric vehicles.

Other chips

Of course, in addition to these chip giants, there are many chip giants or new forces to launch their chip and application portfolio.

Renesas expands its Gallium nitride (GaN) power semiconductor portfolio to enable more efficient, compact and reliable electronic control components.