How many chips does a car need? In the past, manufacturing a traditional car generally required about 500-600 chips. With the continuous development of the automotive industry, today‘s cars are gradually developing from mechanical to electronic, and cars are becoming more and more intelligent. The number of chips required is naturally more. It is understood that the average number of chips required for each vehicle in 2021 has reached more than 1,000.

In addition to traditional cars, new energy vehicles are the "big players" in chips. Such vehicles require a large number of DC-AC inverters, transformers, inverters and other components, and these demand for semiconductor devices such as IGBTs, MOSFETs, and diodes. There has also been a substantial increase. A better new energy vehicle may require about 2,000 chips, and the demand is very staggering.

The Association of Automobile Manufacturers pointed out that the current chip size of the global semiconductor industry is between US$300 billion and US$400 billion. Among them, automotive chips are about 40 billion US dollars, accounting for less than 10%, which will obviously lead to a weak situation for car companies when scheduling production or competing for orders.

From the perspective of technical requirements, automotive-grade chips are indeed prohibitive for most chip companies. Consumer electronics chip technology iterates very fast, and automotive-grade chips are almost all technologies more than ten years ago. Although the technology is "outdated", the threshold has not been lowered. On the contrary, automotive-grade chips have high requirements for performance indicators, service life, reliability, safety, and quality consistency, which are difficult for consumer electronic chips to match.

Compared with consumer chips and general industrial chips, the working environment of automotive chips is even harsher: the temperature range can be as wide as -40℃~155℃, high vibration, dust, electromagnetic interference, etc. Due to the issue of personal safety, automotive chips have higher requirements for reliability and safety, and the general design life is 15 years or 200,000 kilometers. "Vehicle-grade" chips need to go through a rigorous certification process, including the reliability standard AEC-Q100, the quality management standard ISO/TS 16949, and the functional safety standard ISO26262.

The high standards, strict requirements, and long cycle of automotive-grade chips have repeatedly raised the entry threshold, which also directly leads to only chip companies with strong comprehensive capabilities or vertical integration capabilities and the ability to maximize their scale advantages. Automotive-grade chips are included in the production list. Looking at the world, there are only a few such automotive-grade chip companies such as NXP, Infineon, and Siemens. It is hoped that the supply and demand of automotive chips will increase in the future.