The production line, which completed installation on September 5, can produce 500,000 automotive chips per year.

(Image credit: Rednet.cn)

BYD's semiconductor division will start production next month at its facility in Changsha, Hunan province in central China, after its similar facility in Jinan, east China's Shandong province, went into operation earlier this year.

BYD Semiconductor Changsha's 8-inch automotive chip production line completed installation on September 5 and began pre-production commissioning, according to a September 8 report by local news site Rednet.cn.

The plant is expected to go into operation in early October and can produce 500,000 automotive chips per year, according to the report.

Key equipment for the production line, including photolithography machines, etching machines and ion implanters, are imported, with 208 sets, worth about RMB 890 million, the report said.

The equipment began arriving in Changsha in June, and local customs authorities set up a special task force to speed up the clearance process, helping BYD Semiconductor advance the production line's start-up schedule by one month, according to the report.

BYD Semiconductor was established in October 2004, with BYD directly holding a 72.30 percent stake as the company's controlling shareholder, and BYD founder Wang Chuanfu indirectly controlling 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.

At the end of February, local media reported that BYD Semiconductor's 8-inch automotive power chip project in Shandong went into production, with a planned annual output of 360,000 wafers.

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

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

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