Taipei, Sept. 6 (CNA) Jack Cheng (???), the Chief Executive Officer of the MIH Consortium, shared at a SEMICON forum on Wednesday how MIH is developing technologies that utilize semiconductors to enhance the performance and efficiency of EVs and said the consortium will first aim at Taiwan’s B2B market.
The MIH (Mobility In Harmony) Consortium is an open electric vehicle platform and initiative led by Taiwan-based manufacturing giant Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Cheng, the MIH CEO, was one of the featured speakers at SEMICON Taiwan 2023’s Power and Opto Semiconductor Forum, which was co-organized by SEMI and Hon Hai Research Institute.
MIH said in April that it will roll out its first electric vehicle prototype – a three-seater – at the 2023 Japan Mobility Show in Tokyo in October, with six-seater and nine-seater prototypes also expected to be launched within the next two years.
In Wednesday’s keynote speech titled “From Silicon to Street: How Semiconductors and Electric Vehicles are Reshaping Mobility,” Cheng said that semiconductors would play a critical role in the rapidly expanding electric vehicle industry, acting as the backbone of power management, motors, and MCUs (Motor Control Unit) in electric vehicles.
In terms of rate of growth, the market size of the semiconductor application in automotive is expected to increase at a rate much faster than other applications such as smartphones and personal computers, though the most widely-used, Cheng said.
While the latter two are anticipated to grow from US$144 billion in 2022 to US$150 billion in 2025 and from US$115 billion to US$124 billion, respectively, the market revenue of the application of semiconductors in automotive is expected to increase to US$93 billion in 2025, a close-to-50-percent increase (47.6%) from the US$63 billion in 2022, Cheng added, citing Statista’s data on semiconductor market revenue by application published in February 2023.
Applications of semiconductors are multifaceted. “[Vehicles’] body, powertrain, energy, chassis, infotainment, and last but not the least, the ADAS [Advanced Driver Assistance System]; everything is about autonomous drive now,” Cheng said, adding that they use a wide range of semiconductors ranging from analog ICs, discrete semiconductors, digital ICs, memory ICs, optical semiconductors, to sensors and actuators.
The open platform, according to Cheng, now has about 2,700 members, with 200 “very active” and “moving very fast in making solutions” as 14 working groups. Cheng presented three case studies of MIH’s working groups for the applications.
The first is the powertrain working group, which is a case “that is really about SiC [Silicon Carbide].” SiC is a semiconductor base material that has historically been used in high-temperature settings, Cheng said.
He added that in recent years, it has been adopted for use in high-power, high-efficiency applications. According to Cheng, the efficiency of a vehicle’s OBC (On-board Battery Charger), DC/DC converter, and inverter, can all be improved. The SiC application can optimize the cost and with standardization and modularization the development lead time can be shortened, he added.
The second case study is the EEA (electrical and electronic architecture) working group, the plan of which is to adopt HPC (high-performance computing) architecture, for which Cheng said MIH is collaborating with a Taiwanese IC design company for designing the central gateway.
The energy management working group, the third case presented by Cheng, is to develop “a better BMS (battery management system), which is a wireless BMS system.” Battery performance and space efficiency can be enhanced and maintenance costs can be reduced by up to 30 percent, Cheng said.
Cheng also revealed that MIH is aiming first at the B2B market in Taiwan, rather than the B2C like Tesla. “The [vehicles for] car sharing, carpooling, food delivery, and goods delivery” are “a huge opportunity” for “non-branded products.” “We’re talking to them right now,” he said.
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