According to news on October 11, most of the chip solutions related to automotive millimeter-wave radar are still dominated by European and American IDM manufacturers. In Taiwan, only MediaTek has targeted ultra-short-range millimeter-wave radar products; in mainland China, Xiamen's Yixing Semiconductor and Catland Microelectronics are more active in investment. However, American fabless manufacturers, such as Qualcomm, NVIDIA and Xilinx, also plan to use their own computing power to cut into the millimeter-wave radar and lidar market from the automotive camera side, and expand the multi-sensing for vehicles. instrument fusion market. Intel's Mobileye is dominant in the field of ADAS cameras, but recently it does have the ambition to develop in the field of automotive millimeter-wave radar and lidar. Although it has seen actual samples, it has not seen relevant product specifications.

According to news on October 11, most of the chip solutions related to automotive millimeter-wave radar are still dominated by European and American IDM manufacturers. In Taiwan, only MediaTek has targeted ultra-short-range millimeter-wave radar products; in mainland China, Xiamen's Yixing Semiconductor and Catland Microelectronics are more active in investment. However, American fabless manufacturers, such as Qualcomm, NVIDIA and Xilinx, also plan to use their own computing power to cut into the millimeter-wave radar and lidar market from the automotive camera side, and expand the multi-sensing for vehicles. instrument fusion market. Intel's Mobileye is dominant in the field of ADAS cameras, but recently it does have the ambition to develop in the field of automotive millimeter-wave radar and lidar. Although it has seen actual samples, it has not seen relevant product specifications.

The main core of the automotive millimeter-wave radar system design lies in the radio frequency chip itself. Apart from the frequency range, the invested manufacturers include TI, NXP, Infineon, ADI, ST, MediaTek, as well as Yixing Semiconductor and Catland Microelectronics Isometric manufacturers, in terms of the number of manufacturers, are already quite large.

If it is further expanded to the design of the entire millimeter-wave system, whether it is image radar, long or short-range radar, etc., most of the chips such as microprocessors, microcontrollers and power management components are required to meet the design requirements of the entire system. What's more, due to the rise of information security concepts in recent years, for example, ST hopes to provide independent information security chips to improve the design of automotive millimeter-wave systems and reduce the possibility of being attacked by hackers.

If the automotive millimeter-wave radar system is further subdivided, it can be divided into image radar, 76-81GHz and 24GHz frequency bands, and 76-81GHz frequency band, which can also be divided into frequency bands for short-distance ranging, considering market demand, chip manufacturers Most of them also put their resources in this field and try to deal with as many Tier 1 manufacturers as possible.

▲ List of automotive millimeter-wave radar chip (MMIC) suppliers. (Source: Various manufacturers; Compiled by Top Industry Research Institute, 2021/10)

As can be seen from the above table, there are not many semiconductor manufacturers with image radar chips. The main reason is that the development of automotive millimeter-wave radar is entering its infancy, and the manufacturers of related products are relatively limited, except for Intel and NXP that own imagery. Except for radar chips and Xilinx's cooperation with Tier 1 giant Continental in 2020, there is not much information about automotive image radar in the market.

However, compared with long- and short-range ranging radars, automotive image radars require more millimeter-wave antennas. In terms of the number of channels of the ARS (Advanced Radar Sensor) 540 transceiver jointly developed by Xilinx and Continental, the transmitter (Tx) ) has 12 sets of channels, and the receiving end (Rx) has 16 sets, the distance is 300 meters, and the angle is plus or minus 60 degrees, so it also needs more computing power, so whether it is TI, NXP and Xilinx etc., all have corresponding processor products in the field of image radar.

Going back to the general 76~81GHz frequency band automotive millimeter-wave radar chips, most chip manufacturers entering this field, in principle, give priority to the 76~81GHz frequency band, but some manufacturers will focus on 77~79GHz or 76GHz. ~77GHz and other frequency bands, as for the number of transceiver channels, generally 3 sets of transmitters and 4 sets of receivers are more common, but such as MediaTek MT2706, due to the positioning of the chip to replace the ultrasonic radar, lock the ultra-short-range sense We want to achieve a better balance between cost and performance.

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