Geely’s Dragon Eagle-1 first China-made automotive-grade chip is on more than 200,000 vehicles
On December 25, SiEngine announced that its Dragon Eagle-1 automotive-grade 7-nanometer cockpit chip is now on more than 200,000 vehicles since the chip’s first release in December 2021. So far, Dragon Eagle-1 can be found on the Lynk & Co 08 SUV, Lynk & Co 06 EM-P SUV, and Livan 7 SUV, which are all part of the Geely Auto Group; and has received orders from other manufacturers including FAW for more than 20 vehicle models.
Dragon Eagle-1 is China’s first automotive-grade 7-nanometer system-on-chip (SoC) cockpit chip, which is an integrated circuit that compresses all of a system’s required components onto one chip. As small as the size of a fingernail (83 mm²), it has 8.8 billion transistors and 87 layers of circuits. In layman’s terms, that is equivalent to 8.8 billion small houses and 87 floors. Furthermore, Dragon Eagle-1 has an 8-core CPU, 14-core GPU, programmable NPU, ISP, VPU, and DSP clusters.
About SiEngine
The company behind the Dragon Eagle-1 chip is SiEngine, which is a joint venture between ECARX and ARM China, established in the Wuhan Economic and Technological Development Zone in September 2018, dedicated to the design, development, and sales of advanced automotive electronic chips, according to the company website. ECARX is an automotive technology provider co-founded by Eric Li (Li Shufu), who is also the founder and chairman of Geely, in 2017. ARM is a chip design company under Softbank, headquartered in Cambridge, UK. As of June 30, 2022, ECARX held a 30.97% equity interest in SiEngine. As SiEngine’s important shareholders, ECARX and ARM China also provided core support for SiEngine’s early IP design and tape-out.
In both 2022 and 2023, SiEngine received three capital investments, including a strategic investment from FAW, Series A financing led by Sequoia China and followed by investors from diversified industrial chains, and Series A+ financing with participation from Teda Venture Capital and Haier Capital. Currently, SiEngine’s Chairman is Shen Ziyu, who also serves as Chairman and CEO of ECARX and Xingji Meizu, a subsidiary of Geely. So SiEngine is technically a chip company owned by Geely.
Source: SiEngine