According to Huajin Securities, Huawei, as a leading domestic enterprise in intelligent driving technology, has participated in the formulation of a number of industry standards and continues to lead the development of the domestic intelligent driving industry. At the Earlier Autonomous Driving Network China Industry Summit, Wang Tao, Executive Director of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., said, "We have worked with the three major operators to carry out more than 200 autonomous driving innovation projects covering five major specialties and three business areas, and jointly incubated 35 scenario-based applications, promoting the transformation of technological achievements and commercial applications. At the same time, Huawei has participated in more than 36 autonomous driving innovation projects and jointly incubated 35 scenario-based applications, promoting the transformation of technological achievements and commercial applications. At the same time, Huawei has also participated in the development of 36 autonomous driving network standards, covering seven major areas, including vision, architecture, level standards, and interface specifications, promoting the formation of industry consensus and accelerating the gradual maturity of the standard system.”
In addition, in the process of cooperation with many car companies, Huawei is also promoting the consensus of intelligent driving standards among some enterprises. For example, it cooperates with Changan Deep Blue to promote the application of Qiankun intelligent driving related technologies in Deep Blue models, and the two sides have formed certain standards in terms of function definition and performance indicators of intelligent driving. In the cooperation with JETOUR, Huawei's Qiankun Intelligent Driving ADS3.0 system is equipped as standard in all JETOUR models, further standardizing and clarifying the functions and performance standards of intelligent driving in urban and high-speed scenarios.
Huawei uses its self-developed Ascend AI chips in the field of intelligent driving, such as the MDC intelligent driving computing platform, with a computing power of more than 100TOPS and supports L3 and above autonomous driving functions, providing powerful in-vehicle AI computing capabilities for intelligent driving, efficiently processing multi-sensor fusion data, and performing complex tasks such as image recognition and decision-making. Huawei's MDC Pro 610, for example, uses Samsung's 12GB LPDDR5 SDRAM as the memory, providing ample memory support for seamless data processing, ensuring that the system can run efficiently when handling complex computing tasks. It is also equipped with Kioxia's 64GB 3D TLC NAND flash memory and ISSI's serial flash memory for storing driving data and system logs, ensuring reliable and fast access to data storage. For efficient power management, Huawei's MDC Pro 610 controller uses chips from Infineon, Lattice Semiconductor, and others. These power management ICs are responsible for regulating voltage, ensuring system stability in a wide range of environments, and reducing energy consumption.
Figure: In the field of computing SoCs for intelligent driving, Huawei has self-developed its main control chips, and most of its supply chains are overseas manufacturers
In the sensor link of the intelligent driving supply chain, the parts in the lidar field are dominated by foreign countries, and Huawei has invested in domestic substitution through Hubble. Many key chips such as the main control chip and driver chip of LiDAR come from overseas manufacturers. For example, some high-precision analog-to-digital conversion chips (ADCs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), etc., are mainly provided by overseas companies such as Texas Instruments and Xilinx. These chips have high performance and stability in signal processing and data transmission, which is the key to high-precision detection of LiDAR.
Huawei has laid out domestic substitution through Hubble
Huawei Hubble has invested in VERTILITE several times in 2020. The company develops and sells high-power and high-transmittance VCSEL lasers, which are important light sources for lidar. At present, VERTILITE's core VCSEL products have been mass-produced in automobiles, ranking among the top two in the world in terms of market share, providing support for the supply of domestic light sources for Huawei's LiDAR. Hubble took a stake in Everbright Photonics in January 2022, and as of the first quarter of 2024, Hubble Investment holds 3.74% of the shares. Everbright Photonics is a supplier of lidar transmitter chips and one of the few companies in the world with the mass production capacity of high-power laser chips, and its products break the monopoly of foreign companies and provide transmitter chips for lidars such as LUXEED S7, achieving a breakthrough in domestic substitution of key components.
Benefiting from the rapid development of unmanned driving, intelligent transportation, robotics, surveying and mapping and other fields, the market demand for lidar will continue to be strong. Taking vehicle lidar as an example, with the intelligent upgrade of automobiles, its installed capacity and standard configuration rate will continue to increase. With the development of the lidar industry, China will gradually establish a complete system of standards and specifications, including product performance standards, safety standards, test methods, etc., which will help standardize the market order and promote the quality improvement and market promotion of domestic lidar products.
