car factory to put together the last piece of puzzle for consumers.

At the IAA mobility in Munich, Germany in 2021, many well-known automobile manufacturers, including Porsche, showed their pure electric vehicles or pure electric concept vehicles. In addition to adding more and more intelligent driving functions, most of the new cars are equipped with large-scale digital touch panels. In addition, the car audio-visual entertainment system, security and anti hacking technology, and the efficiency of the total operating body of electric vehicles have also been improved; The processing capacity of cloud and edge computing has also been greatly enhanced, which is embodied in digital information stream processing, regional structure and equipment digitization. At the same time, new energy storage concepts have been introduced, and even environmental protection issues such as material recovery and recycling have a new look. Obviously, the horn of digital revolution has been sounded in the automotive field.

On June 8 this year, the European Parliament voted to support the EU's substantial ban on the sale of new fuel vehicles from 2035. Although this resolution has met with some opposition, it has become a consensus that electric vehicles will become the mainstream of the market in the future. Thus, the digital revolution of the automobile has brought infinite imagination to memory chip manufacturers. Among the various kinds of memory chips, the "war" between flash memory chips and the automobile market seems to be more intense.

HPC platform will become the standard configuration of future cars, and flash memory chip is the key screw to promote the revolution

The transition from the current mainstream fuel vehicles to electric vehicles and gradually to pure electric vehicles and even driverless vehicles depends on the continuous improvement of driving assistance systems, as well as the continuous development of new automobile chips by automobile chip manufacturers to achieve higher levels of automatic driving functions and continuous improvement of AI algorithms.

HPC integrates high-performance multi-core chips, on-board operating systems, diverse software systems, high-speed and low delay communication, functional security, information security, OTA and other complex technologies to meet the application needs of high-level automatic driving and vehicle control. The introduction of HPC represents a fundamental redesign of the automotive electronic and electrical architecture. At present, many tier 1 automobile manufacturers are considering adopting a regional architecture, with the central HPC platform making the highest decision, and then transmitting information instructions and power through domain controllers distributed in various parts of the vehicle body.

The future intelligent car is just like the current smart phone. Consumers can choose the high configuration version at a higher cost, equipped with the latest software / hardware, equipped with higher-level audio-visual facilities, and stronger security; Or choose the lowest consumption and purchase vehicles with the lowest standard configuration that meet the requirements of regulations. For automobile manufacturers, the source of income will no longer depend solely on the sales of new cars or maintenance. Customers can freely choose software and platforms of different payment levels, subscribe to online video and audio streams monthly or all year round, or even purchase related services such as auxiliary automatic driving at a one-time premium, which will bring additional revenue growth to car dealers.

According to relevant statistical data, the market scale of automotive HPC this year is about US $560 million. In the future, the market scale of automotive HPC will double every year, and will reach US $8.05 billion by 2025. In order to compete for this market, various automotive chip developers have also launched new HPC SOC (system on chip) chips, some of which are even equipped with AI deep learning accelerators, which will collect, analyze, learn and accumulate big data databases for automotive related data, and help the continuous improvement of new algorithms in the future. Therefore, the memory chip, which is responsible for collecting and storing a large amount of information, has become the cornerstone of the road to digitalization.

The information flow language of automobiles also needs the support of flash memory chips

With the evolution of automobile to digital, the demand for data storage and transmission of information flow is higher and higher. The transmission of information flow and the reading and processing of data are important elements of communication between devices. OTA plays a medium for devices to continuously learn and understand new devices and new communication languages. Therefore, the application demand of Ota wireless update will become more and more, and the security maintenance, authentication and authorization of personal and vehicle information related to OTA will become more and more important.

Not only that, on-board equipment also needs information flow communication. Thus, cellular vehicle to everything (c-v2x) was born, playing an important role in increasing road traffic safety, improving traffic smoothness and saving total energy consumption. According to relevant data statistics, c-v2x is growing at a compound annual growth rate of about 30% every year. It is expected that the market size will reach 18.8 billion US dollars in 2027.

C-v2x is an on-board communication system, which includes other more specific communication types, such as V2I (vehicle to infrastructure), v2n (vehicle to network), V2V (vehicle to vehicle), V2P (vehicle to pedestrian), v2d (vehicle to device and equipment) and other information transmission and interpretation between vehicles and different systems or devices. On the information stream of these wireless communications, The most important thing is to interpret and analyze the data flow in time for driving safety.

In this process, all automotive applications need qualified storage products and equipment, which will last for a long time in the embedded environment under extreme temperatures. As a reliable nonvolatile memory, the typical characteristics of NOR flash include fast reading speed, high stability, and no loss of data when it is disconnected, which makes it impossible to be easily replaced in automotive applications.

However, with the gradual increase in the amount of data such as startup or startup information or user related information to be written by various devices, NAND flash, which has the advantage of large memory capacity and cost, is also gradually showing its importance under more and more complicated recording needs.

The driving force behind the flash car market

Since the development of flash technology, nor flash market has begun to favor niche industries. Especially after smart phones gradually replaced function machines, the NOR flash market was further compressed to less than $2 billion, making many large storage manufacturers withdraw from the competition in the NOR flash market. After 2016, the demand for consumer electronics and Internet of things devices with low and medium capacity increased, which led to the recovery of NOR Flash Market and attracted some new players to join the market. The intervention and rise of new forces have brought nor flash into new competition.

From the overall market situation, thanks to the emergence of emerging application scenarios and the impact of stock shortage, nor flash has ushered in an upward cycle. According to the report of IC insights in the second quarter of this year, in 2021, nor flash only accounted for 4% of the whole flash memory market, but the sales of NOR flash products soared 63% to US $2.9 billion last year. Last year, nor's shipment increased by 33%, while the average selling price increased by more than 20%. The NOR flash market is expected to grow by another 21% to $3.5 billion in 2022.

However, according to the situation reflected in the application market, most of the low capacity application scenarios of NOR flash are the Internet of things and consumer electronic devices. With the increasingly fierce competition in this part of the market, it is easy to fall into the situation of gradually decreasing profits. Therefore, major storage manufacturers are also trying to break into high-end application scenarios.

A large number of application scenarios brought by the digitalization of automobiles have brought new hope to memory. According to the performance of several nor flash manufacturers counted by IC insights, the growth of NOR flash products of most manufacturers mainly comes from automotive applications. A number of manufacturers seized the auto market, once again activating the vitality of NOR flash market.

Huabang electronics is the largest nor flash supplier, with sales of more than US $1 billion, accounting for about one third of the market share of NOR flash. As the leader of the NOR flash market, Huabang electronics has been deeply engaged in the automotive field for more than ten years. At present, the top ten car manufacturers in the world are the end customers of Huabang electric storage products. Its existing niche DRAM, SLC NAND and other product lines have also recently expanded the layout of NOR flash in vehicles to spur high margin product lines.

Specifically, Huabang serial nor flash has always occupied most market applications for vehicles. With the improvement of digitization, the volume of code that needs to be stored is also increasing. Facing the demand of instant messaging and fast uploading and downloading, Huabang electronics has also launched octalland flash with 8 I / O interfaces. With 8 I / O, the highest transmission speed per second can reach 240mb, which can be applied to high-speed transmission and low time delay applications. Octal nor flash will also join this competitive market in the near future.

In addition, Huabang electronics is also suitable for many applications, including wireless communication system, lidar, tire pressure detector, on-board wireless charging system, electric vehicle battery management system, airbag system, head up display, power management system and audio; OTA wireless update system, covering network communication, audio-visual entertainment and driving recorder; It can support various applications of v2x, such as car navigation, digital dashboard, and driving monitoring and interaction system; It is used in vehicle mounted fields such as gateways and gateways, and gateway cameras.

No matter which direction the on-board equipment develops, driving safety is the primary consideration of the automobile industry. Adhering to the belief of high quality, high efficiency, low energy consumption and advanced information security protection products, Huabang electronics has continuously launched a variety of flash memory products suitable for automotive applications. Huabang electronics hopes to cooperate with the car factory to put together the last piece of puzzle for consumers.

Electric vehicles blow the digital horn, and the flash memory market ushers in a fierce battle