To Release Automotive Chips for Tesla in Jan.
Samsung Electronics is pumping up efforts to expand its presence in the electric vehicle semiconductor market.
The company is planning to release semiconductors for next-generation self-driving cars to be supplied to Tesla in the first week of January next year. Industry experts expect the chip to go into Tesla’s pickup truck, Cybertruck.
The new full self-driving (FSD) chip is currently in production on the 7-nano process at the Hwaseong plant in Korea. Tesla has been outsourcing FSD chip production to Samsung since 2019, and the chips had previously been mass-produced at Samsung Electronics’ Austin plant in Texas, the United States.
“Samsung Electronics also provides some design support for the production of the chip,” an industry insider said. “The Korean semiconductor giant chose to produce the chip on its 7-nm process at Hwaseong plant to ensure a high production yield and the safety of electric vehicles, I think.”
Tesla chose Samsung Electronics as its next-generation FSD chip foundry service provider, considering various conditions such as production costs and long-term cooperation. Some sources say that Samsung Electronics will also supply Tesla with advanced vehicle memory solutions such as high-performance solid state drives (SSDs) and graphic DRAMs.
The memory solutions that Samsung provides to Tesla include PCIe Gen3 NVMe 256 GB SSDs, 2 GB DDR4 DRAMs, 2 GB GDDR6 Graphics DRAMs for autonomous driving systems and 128 GB universal flash storage (UFS) devices.
According to market research firm IHS Markit, the semiconductor market for automobiles is expected to grow from US$45 billion in early 2021 to US$74 billion by 2026. Demand for automotive semiconductors is also expected to grow by 8 percent annually, from 132.5 billion units in 2021 to 208.3 billion in 2027.
Accordingly, Samsung Electronics seems to be actively making sales pitches, targeting other automakers besides Tesla. In particular, last month, it drew much attention by introducing three types of vehicle system semiconductors installed in Volkswagen electric vehicles.
“As vehicle electronics systems continue to advance, Samsung Electronics will be able to secure a bigger presence in the automotive semiconductor market going forward,” an industry analyst said.