Nio's first chip, a LiDAR master chip, will begin mass production in October, the company previously said.

Nio's first chip is a LiDAR master chip, model NX6031, which will begin mass production in October, William Li, the company's founder, chairman, and CEO, said at the Nio IN 2023 innovation day event on September 21.

The chip is named Yangjian, after Yang Jian, a character in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) novel Fengshen Yanyi (The Investiture of the Gods).

In the novel, Yang has a third eye on his forehead and is able to recognize demons. Nio's latest NT 2.0 platform models feature roof-mounted LiDAR, which can help identify obstacles.

Yangjian is the first in-house developed chip released by Nio's smart hardware team, featuring an 8-core, 64-bit processor equipped with 8 channels of 9 bit sampling at a sampling rate of 1 GHz.

The chip allows Nio to save about $100 per vehicle, Li said in an interview with English-language media, including CnEVPost, after the September 21 event.

The Yangjian chip bears the logos of Nio and Innovusion, the EV company's LiDAR supplier, and all eight of Nio's models currently on sale are based on the latest NT 2.0 platform, which comes standard with ultra-long-range Falcon LiDAR from Innovusion.

The Yangjian chip was defined by Innovusion and developed by Nio's R&D team, Li said in the interview in response to a question from CnEVPost about the division of work between Nio and Innovusion in developing the chip.

Nio unveils 1st in-house developed chip, mass production to begin in Oct