Compared with the beginning of the epidemic in 2020, the current chip crisis is "more severe".

　　According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, my country's chips are currently experiencing the most difficult period since 2019. my country's chip production fell 4.1% in the first quarter, compared with a 5.1% drop in March.

　　The epidemic in Shanghai, the center of the storm, has now formed a comprehensive effect:

　　TOKYO, April 22 (Reuters) - Honda Motor Co. plans to cut output by about 50 percent at two production lines at a Japanese factory, citing chip shortages and logistical delays.

　　Three days ago, Toyota had to shut down nine factories in Japan for the same reason. And it plans to reduce global production by 10% in May, and the target is lowered to 700,000 vehicles.

　　According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the output of integrated circuits fell by 4.2% in the first three months of this year. Chipmakers reported a steeper decline in March. It was the lowest quarterly output since the first quarter of 2019, when chip production fell 8.7%.

　　Large semiconductor manufacturers such as SMIC and Hua Hong Semiconductor have struggled to obtain components, and chip makers have been having difficulty procuring some components, with chip production down 5.1 percent in March.

　　On April 18, the automotive chip company Onsemi announced that due to the impact of the epidemic and prevention and control management, the global distribution center of ON Semiconductor in China was forced to close, and it has begun to transfer production capacity to overseas distribution centers.

　　Realizing the seriousness of the problem, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a statement on April 19: Continue to implement the car chip attack action, and make every effort to improve the chip supply capacity.

　　Production logic is challenged

　　Toyota is a well-deserved expert in "lean management". Its cost control logic has been verified and polished for many years, and it is a model for reference in the industry.

　　However, under the multiple superposition of the epidemic and the Russian-Ukrainian war, this logic has suffered repeated setbacks. Although the recent financial report shows that Toyota still has the ability to "increase revenue without increasing profits" under unfavorable circumstances, but it has announced several production cuts, and its production capacity imbalance is self-evident.

　　Bosch may be able to empathize with Toyota's experience.

　　Some Bosch insiders told Fenghuang.com that, thanks to the stable supply chain relationship and the high requirements of the storage environment, Bosch hardly stocks chips and has always implemented "zero inventory".

　　However, this convenient strategy also made Bosch suffer. Due to the lack of inventory reserves to deal with emergencies, it was sued by Volkswagen and other OEMs for compensation.

　　Counting down another ten days, NIO couldn't keep up with the propaganda: As early as mid-to-late March, the supply had been cut off, and the inventory had been exhausted.

　　Yu Chengdong's "loss" stalk is widely circulated: he said that the market price of chips originally 20-30 yuan has been smashed to more than 2,000 yuan.

　　Some industry commentators believe that Yu Chengdong is exaggerating.

　　However, CCTV Technology reported, "At the beginning of this year, in the SEG electronics market in Huangpu District, Shanghai, a core chip L9369 of the body electronic stability system produced by STMicroelectronics, the original price was only about 20 yuan, and now it has been fired to 2800 yuan, soaring more than 100 times", which can confirm that what Yu Chengdong said is true.

　　"A car can't be produced without one part." In addition to the above-mentioned car companies, some car companies have disclosed similar problems, including but not limited to Honda, Yu Dongfeng Nissan, Great Wall Tank, Ideal, Tesla, etc.

　　Many automakers have reported problems with parts supply, although some of them are reluctant to say which parts are missing. However, there is news that many of the people who tear up the production and operation of car companies are missing cores.

　　The Shanghai epidemic has undoubtedly aggravated and deepened the core shortage.

　　In the industry, Shanghai is regarded as China's "core city", and the area radiating from Shanghai to the triangular area is the domestic chip base.

　　The TSMC semiconductor factory and SMIC's headquarters, which are responsible for the foundry of 8-inch wafers, are located in Shanghai.

　　The second largest wafer chip foundry in mainland China, Hua Hong Group, is also headquartered in Shanghai, and it also has a core business layout in Wuxi, Jiangsu.

　　In terms of integrated circuits, Shanghai's industrial scale accounts for 1/4 of the country's total, with more than 700 key enterprises.

　　Shanghai's status in the domestic chip arena can be said to be distributed from upstream equipment, materials, software, to chip design, production, packaging and testing involved in the midstream, and to downstream chip applications. The industrial dimension has distinct advantages. .

　　Therefore, when Shanghai suffers from the epidemic: isolation and blockade, shutdown of production, and logistics brakes, it is not difficult to understand Shanghai's "chip difficulty".

　　Is it because of "mother's shortcomings" that car chips are difficult to deal with?

　　What kind of chips are car companies lacking? Why is it so difficult?

　　Mr. He, an automotive engineer, told Fenghuang.com that the shortage of automotive chips mainly refers to MCU automotive microcontrollers.

　　MCU microcontroller is the integration of peripheral interfaces such as central processing unit, memory, flash memory, counter, A/D conversion, serial port, etc. on a single chip to form a chip-level computer.

　　Engines, gearboxes, ESP/ABS, windows, airbags, air-conditioning compressors, etc. all need MCU control. There are about dozens of MCUs in a traditional fuel vehicle. For example, the BMW 7 series has about 40 MCUs. On smart electric vehicles like Weilai, there will be hundreds of MCUs. These MCUs control different components, but they are all automotive-grade chips.

　　In China, low-end chip MCU products such as 4-bit, 8-bit, and 16-bit domestic brands have a relatively high self-sufficiency rate, while the mid-to-high-end MCU market is mainly monopolized by big brands such as Infineon, STMicroelectronics, Renesas, and NXP.

　　Regarding the high requirements for automotive-grade chips, Mr. He said that consumer electronics can tolerate downtime and restart, but few chips in cars can tolerate such failures.

　　Take the requirements of Renesas automotive-grade chips as an example: the chips are required to work normally in an electrostatic environment with ambient temperature of -40°C to 75°C, humidity of 95%, and 15-25KV, and have a 20-year shelf life. It is not allowed to be damaged inside, and the defective rate of the product is less than 1 in 1 million, which is almost 0.

　　In addition, automotive-grade chips must meet the specifications of the International Automotive Electronics Association: AEC-Q100 reliability standard, IATF 16949, the zero-failure supply chain quality management standard, and ISO 26262 functional safety standard, of which ISO 26262 functional safety standard It is necessary to be able to have sufficient redundancy to ensure product safety under the condition of failure without affecting the safety of the entire vehicle.

　　"It is not difficult, but the requirements are high, but the profit is not high", which is the characteristic of automotive chips.

　　Contrast hurts. Consumer-grade chips do not have these strict requirements. People just tolerate the possibility that the mobile phone may not work below 0°C, and the toy dog ​​chip will be broken.

　　Mr. He said that TSMC currently produces about 70% of the world's MCUs.

　　Chip manufacturers such as Infineon and NXP have transferred orders to foundries. Among them, Infineon transferred 65nm chips to TSMC in 2009; in 2018, Infineon outsourced half of its production, and plans to increase the proportion of MCU outsourcing to 70% within five years. Renesas is even more exaggerated. When layoffs in 2012, it outsourced automotive MCUs to TSMC. Up to now, the MCU outsourcing ratio has reached more than 90%.

　　Due to the long lead time of chip supply (16 weeks from order to shipment, and 26 weeks for some complex chips such as ESP or navigation systems), there is no possibility of switching to a second supplier in the short term. Therefore, when MCU supply is limited, TSMC can almost only be asked to increase production capacity.

　　And this means that the eggs of car chip production capacity are all placed in one basket.

　　But TSMC did not "make a profit", Mr. He said, because the profit of automobile chips accounted for 3% of TSMC's revenue, while mobile phone chips accounted for 48%.

　　Therefore, the objective reasons for "the epidemic has led to insufficient production lines, high-end chips such as mobile phones can suppress the tea power of automobile chips, and the continuous increase in the demand for chips in automobiles under the penetration of intelligent network technology" are eliminated.

　　Subjective reason: Compared with low-profit and high-demand automotive-grade chips, chip factories are more willing to tilt their production capacity to high-profit, low-demand consumer-grade chips. This is the most normal choice for manufacturers to pursue business interests.

　　This means that automotive-grade chips are not easily favored.

　　The current shortage of spare parts makes the upstream and downstream industry chains of automobiles reflect on risk management, with the intention of evolving into an ecosystem.

　　In addition, the long production cycle of fabs, the long delivery cycle of chips, and the black swan and gray rhinoceros that come in at any time have brought great uncertainty to the supply of chips.

　　Write at the end:

　　Cui Dongshu, secretary-general of the Automobile Market Research Branch of China Automobile Dealers Association (Car Association) [1], told Fenghuang.com that the demand for chip manufacturing has been frustrated at the high end recently (demand for mobile phones and other items has shrunk significantly), and due to the accumulation of the industrial chain of the world's automobile enterprises Chips, the high sales volume and high profits brought by automotive supply-side control are the biggest profit source of chip companies. Therefore, automotive chips with low-end and backward production capacity have become the biggest growth business of chip companies. In the future, the supply and price of automotive chips will improve significantly.

　　This is the news that the global chip supply pressure has been eased.

　　In Shanghai, China, with the release of the "Guidelines for the Resumption of Epidemic Prevention and Control of Industrial Enterprises in Shanghai (First Edition)" on April 16, the upstream and downstream automobile enterprises on the whitelist have entered the operation process.

　　On April 22, the news brought by the Shanghai Municipal Government's press conference on epidemic prevention and control was that within a week, 70% of the 666 key whitelisted enterprises had resumed work and production.

　　Logistics is relatively eased. An insider from Bosch told Fenghuang.com that due to its insistence on closed-loop production, there was a phenomenon of warehouse explosion before. With the logistics transfer policy, the production materials piled on the roadside have been delivered one after another.

　　Zhang Xiang, dean of the New Energy Vehicle Technology Research Institute of Jiangxi New Energy Technology Vocational College, said that in the past two days, six transfer stations are planned to be established in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai. Among them, Shanghai is located in Jiading and Minhang, Zhejiang is located in Hangzhou and Ningbo, but Jiangsu has not yet been determined.

　　In the past, the transportation of production materials was "factory-to-factory", but now, "if a batch of goods departs from Shanghai to Zhejiang, it may need to transit through Jiading and Hangzhou. At each transit station, the trailers carrying the goods are released and disinfected. , The driver cooperates with the nucleic acid antigen test and returns. That is to say, the transportation completed by one driver and one truck now requires three vehicles and three drivers, which increases the cost and reduces the efficiency, but fortunately, the logistics is running. Get up," Zhang Xiang said.

　　Few people are happy to predict the countdown to the recovery of chip supply capacity. Manpower and supply chain material constraints are still problems. In addition, under the support of many uncertain factors such as rising demand and raw material prices, as well as unhealthy supply chain relationships, the chip crisis is still present.