Hyundai Motor said more than a month ago that the continuing report of the body chip shortage is unlikely to be worse than it is now. Although the automaker’s views are more positive than most people in the industry, at the beginning of last week, Mercedes recently stated that The shortage of automotive chips may continue until 2023.
When shortages began to appear in December 2020, it was expected that the problem would only affect car production for a short time, because chip makers have already tilted their production capacity to car orders. However, the nano-scale circuits on the chip need to go through several weeks of complicated and long production steps before they can be printed on the silicon substrate. Therefore, the delivery period of the general automobile chip needs at least six months.
Then in early 2021, a series of seemingly unrelated events restricted the supply of original chip wafers from the source. First of all, the cold winter caused the power outages of Infineon, NXP and Samsung's chip factories in Texas. The sudden fire in Japan's Renesas factory in March made the problem worse; finally, the outbreak of the outbreak in Malaysia and Vietnam in the second half of the year stopped downstream supplies. . This series of events has made the shortage of automotive chips more serious.
Market research company AutoForecast Solutions based on the results of these events is that as many as 9.4 million cars, which is more than one-tenth of the entire industry's production before the epidemic, will be excluded from the production plan. "Volkswagen’s purchasing supervisor said helplessly in September this year, "Because of the 50-cent chip, we can’t make a car that sells for $50,000." "
Since the beginning of this year, many multinational car giants, including Volkswagen, Toyota, Ford, Honda, etc., have announced that they will significantly reduce production due to chip supply problems.
Although automakers have begun to adopt a compensatory policy: selling some models with weaker functions, this is obviously not a long-term solution. A better way to solve the shortage of chips can only be to expand production. GlobalFoundries announced its cooperation with Ford last week as a manifestation of this intention.
According to the Nikkei Asia report, GlobalFoundries is expected to double its automotive chip production in 2021. In order to cope with the continuing shortage, an additional USD 6 billion will be invested in expanding its overall production capacity.
GlobalFoundries said: “Compared with 2020, we have more than doubled the wafer production capacity of automotive chips and expect to continue to expand production capacity starting in 2022.” At the same time, GlobalFoundries also emphasized that although there are already It is planned to start production, but the increase in chip production will only gradually see real results in 2023. This view is basically consistent with Mercedes's, that is to say, the problem of chip shortage may not be resolved in the short term.
"It takes a long time for the new investment to be converted into production capacity, and the overall delivery time for the wafers to enter the car manufacturer is also very long," GlobalFoundries explained. TSMC is another participant in the field of chip production. At the beginning of this year, it stated that it has increased the production capacity of automotive chips by 60%, but from the current situation, the situation has not improved significantly.
In early November, General Motors was trapped by a shortage and had to temporarily close some of its factory production lines. The affected models included Chevrolet Equinox and Buick Encore. Toyota and Volkswagen are also forced to stop production from time to time due to chip shortages. Even if GlobalFoundries is not the last chip supplier determined to immediately increase chip production, it seems that 2022 will not be immune to the crisis of shortages.
Most systems in automobiles are essential to safety, regardless of temperature, humidity, vibration, or even slight road debris, they all need to operate under all road conditions. Therefore, with such a significant stake, the well-tested components and chips are obviously better than new and improved ones.
On the other hand, the foundry also has its own ideas on whether to bet on all car orders. "For fabs, the attractiveness of investing in old technologies is much less, because sooner or later they will migrate to new technologies," Qualcomm's president said in an interview in September this year.
In addition, although the forced transformation of car companies is underway, “the new technology is not pin-compatible, nor is it plug-and-play”; “chips need to be redesigned, circuit diagrams are built from scratch, and re-certified, which means It has a mechanical impact on the car, even including important devices such as the car chassis. Therefore, it is the slowest strategy to solve the alternative from the source, that is, to replace the car chip, and we must always be vigilant to produce a domino effect."
It is estimated that the semiconductor shortage has caused the automotive industry to lose US$210 billion in revenue in 2021.
