While China's new energy vehicle industry is growing rapidly, local automotive chip design companies are also on the rise.

Chen Tianshi, founder and CEO of Chinese AI chip company Cambricon, said at the recent 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference that the company is designing a smart driving chip with an arithmetic power of more than 200 TOPS, implying that the company's business extends to the field of in-vehicle smart chips.

The chip is positioned as a "high-grade autonomous driving chip" with a 7nm process and a separate safety island to meet vehicle-grade standards, Chen said.

It is worth noting that Cambricon said in an investor interaction not long ago that the company had not yet entered the field of in-vehicle smart chips.

Cambricon launched its 7nm training chip MLU 290 and smart accellerator Xuansi 1000 in 2020.

Among the chips currently equipped in cars, Tesla HW3.0 has the strongest arithmetic power of 72 TOPS. All of the company's models are equipped with two chips.

The Nvidia Xavier, which is currently in mass production, has an arithmetic power of 30 TOPS and is equipped in Xpeng P7. The Nvidia Orin, which will be in mass production in 2021, has an arithmetic power of 200 TOPS, surpassing the Tesla HW3.0.

Chinese chip company Horizon Robotics' automotive AI chips Journey 5 and Journey 5P taped out in May with 96 TOPS and 128 TOPS respectively.

Earlier this month, Horizon Robotics said the Journey 5 chip had passed the "SGS-TÜV ISO 26262 ASIL-B Ready" functional safety product certification, paving the way for its mass production.

Horizon Robotics' AI chip with up to 128 TOPS computing power gets key certification