The UKUS-listed Chinese electric vehicle trio has made some progress in their push to replace the chips for advanced driving functions inside their cars with home-grown components, following Tesla’s suit in hopes of deriving better computing performance to train their artificial intelligence models. NIO has carried out the tapeout phase for the Shenji NX9031, its first self-developed system on chip (SoC) for assisted driving and conditional autonomous functions, and will integrate the five-nanometer chip into its ET9 executive sedan as planned, scheduled for delivery in early 2025, according to a Monday report by Chinese media outlet 36Kr. The report cited sources as saying the tapeout for Xpeng Motors’ in-house replacement for Nvidia’s DRIVE Orin chips has also started, marking the end of the design process and the beginning of manufacturing. The report added that there is a bit of catching up for Li Auto, which aims for the completion of the tapeout for its in-house advanced driving chip, codenamed Schumacher, by the end of this year. In August 2018, Tesla chief executive Elon Musk revealed the company’s plan to swap Nvidia’s AI system with its Hardware 3.0 chips. [TechNode reporting, 36Kr, in Chinese]
