Commonly Used Automotive Chips

Central Processing Unit (CPU) Chips: In vehicles, CPU chips are mainly used in the car’s infotainment systems, such as onboard navigation and music playback. These chips can handle complex computational tasks, interface with multimedia ports, and provide powerful processing capabilities. Common CPU chips include Qualcomm's Snapdragon Automotive series and Intel's Atom series.

Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Chips: With the electrification and intelligent development of cars, GPUs are becoming increasingly prevalent in vehicles. They are mainly used in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving systems, processing large amounts of video and image data for object recognition, pedestrian recognition, and driving route planning. Notable GPU chips include NVIDIA's Drive AGX series.

Controller Area Network (CAN) Controller Chips: CAN controller chips are mainly used for internal communication in a vehicle, such as the information exchange between the engine control module and the brake control module. CAN controllers effectively organize and manage data flow between various vehicle systems, ensuring accurate information transmission and improving overall vehicle efficiency.

Sensor Chips: Sensor chips play a vital role in vehicles, including speed sensors, pressure sensors, temperature sensors, radar sensors, etc. These sensors can monitor the real-time operational status of the car, providing important information to the driver and essential data support for the car's safety systems.

Power Management IC Chips: In vehicles, power management chips are primarily responsible for supplying power to onboard electronic devices, including startup power, headlight power, and dashboard power. They can effectively manage and allocate power, ensuring the normal operation of onboard electronic devices.

Memory Chips: Infotainment systems, navigation systems, and safety systems in cars require substantial storage space. Therefore, memory chips, such as flash memory chips and solid-state drive chips, play an important role in vehicles. They can store a large amount of data and provide fast read/write speeds, ensuring smooth system operation.

Wireless Communication Chips: With the increasing intelligence of vehicles, connectivity is becoming more critical. Wireless communication chips are key to this functionality, allowing vehicles to connect to the internet, providing data transmission functions, and supporting in-car information services, remote control, real-time navigation, etc. Examples include Qualcomm’s automotive LTE modules and Huawei’s Balong 5G chips.

Security Chips: Information and driving safety are major concerns for consumers, and various security chips are widely used in vehicles. These chips include authentication chips and data encryption chips, which protect the data security of the car and prevent unauthorized access and attacks.

Motor Control Chips: For electric vehicles, motor control chips are crucial. They control the speed and direction of the motor, ensuring stable driving of the vehicle. Additionally, they can effectively manage battery power, improving battery efficiency and extending battery life.

Video Processing Chips: As cars become more intelligent, vision systems are increasingly deployed in vehicles. Video processing chips are mainly used to process image and video data captured by cameras, supporting systems such as assisted driving and autonomous driving. Examples include Mobileye's EyeQ series chips and NVIDIA’s DRIVE PX platform.

In summary, the types of chips used inside cars are diverse, and various chips work together to form the core system of modern intelligent vehicles. With technological advancements, future automotive chips will become more intelligent, offering more features and providing consumers with a better driving experience.