AUTONEWS

Competition for companies like Nvidia from among car companies? Stellantis is preparing its own chips

The world of cars and computer technology is increasingly intertwined, and just as various technology companies have started dabbling in electromobility for cars, so it is also happening the other way around. Automobile companies are now trying to penetrate more into the world of semiconductors, as they are aware that the cars of the future will be computers on wheels. And so they have to become computer companies. The dependence of the automotive industry on the IT world was also very evident in the recent chip crisis, when car production was stopped not by problems with traditional automotive “hardware”, but by IT issues, the lack of various chips and IT components for cars. Cars could drive by themselves, that wasn’t a problem, the problem was precisely on the computer side of modern cars. Automotive concern Stellar he doesn’t want something like this to happen again in the future, so he’s reassessing his semiconductor strategy. His next competition will thus possibly be technology companies including Nvidia, whose computers are becoming the standard in automotive computing, at least as far as autonomous driving is concerned.

Within the plan Dare Forward 2030 the Stellantis car company wants to create a clear database of used chips, to stop using outdated ones, to also plan cooperation and, above all, long-term contracts with manufacturers of semiconductor chips on their supplies. Stellantis also wants to reduce the variety of chips used to reduce the risk that one of the many hundreds or thousands of chips used will stop production. By 2030, it expects to buy €10 billion worth of chips, including SiC MOSFETs for EVs, MCUs for the STLA Brain architecture, and SoCs for HPC computing needed for infotainment and autonomous driving. Today, the company already cooperates with technology companies such as Infineon, NXP Semiconductors, Onsemi and Qualcomm.

But the most interesting information for us is that Stellantis is counting on its own chips for these deployments in the future and would like to compete with today’s chip manufacturers. These should be developed in cooperation with aiMotive and Silicon Auto (a joint venture between Stellantis and Foxconn). The first should provide systems for autonomous driving, the second mainly systems for infotainment that will support OTA updates. We have other companies that would like to compete in the field of autonomous driving with hardware from, for example, Nvidia, whose computers are basically the standard for this today.

Reporter: Milan Šurkala