The project is expected to reach full design capacity in about a year, a BYD Semiconductor executive said.

(Image credit: BYD Semiconductor)

BYD's chip-making arm BYD Semiconductor has put into production an 8-inch automotive power chip project in eastern China's Shandong province, with a planned annual production capacity of 360,000 wafers, local media reported.

This will help ease the shortage of high-power chips for new energy vehicles (NEVs), The Paper reported, citing a TV station in Shandong province.

The project was put into production in January this year and is expected to reach full design capacity in the next year or so, said Li Haitao, deputy general manager of BYD Semiconductor's Jinan branch.

BYD Semiconductor was established in October 2004, and BYD directly holds 72.30 percent of the company's shares, making it the controlling shareholder. BYD founder Wang Chuanfu indirectly controls BYD Semiconductor through BYD.

The company entered the industrial MCU field in 2007 and ranked first in China in terms of market share of industrial-grade touch MCUs.

BYD Semiconductor's business then extended across from industrial-grade MCUs to automotive MCUs, and launched the first generation of 8-bit automotive MCUs in 2018 and the first generation of 32-bit automotive MCUs in 2019, with batch loading in BYD's full range of models.

In May last year, BYD Semiconductor announced that its installed base of automotive MCUs exceeded 10 million units. If the industrial-grade MCU chips were counted, the cumulative shipment exceeded 2 billion units.

At the end of January this year, BYD Semiconductor's plan to go public in the A-share market was approved by local regulators, and it is expected to raise RMB 2 billion ($314 million) through the IPO. The date for the stock to be listed has not yet been determined.