Japanese industry leaders, including Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Subaru, Panasonic, and seven others, are teaming up to develop advanced vehicle software.
Toyota, Japan industry leaders form SoC research group
Earlier this month, twelve companies, including auto, electrical component, and semiconductor makers, created the “Advanced SoC Research for Automotive” (ASRA).
ASRA was established to research and develop high-performance semiconductors (SoC) for vehicles. The group will pool their talents and vast industry experience to develop in-vehicle chips by 2028.
From 2030 onward, the research group aims to install SoCs in mass-produced vehicles. With at least 1,000 semiconductors used in each car nowadays, the tech is becoming more and more critical.
In the new era of digitally connected electric vehicles, software is key. SoCs power many functions, including infotainment and autonomous driving capabilities.
ASRA aims to develop SoC’s with chiplet tech and various semiconductor types. Chiplets are smaller chips that are used to form a bigger one. They can help reduce development time and costs while offering more performance.
The research group will collaborate with industry, government, and other partners to advance the technology.
ASRA members include:
- Automakers: Toyota, Honda, Mazda, Nissan, and Subaru.
- Electrical component manufacturers: Denso and Panasonic.
- Semiconductor companies: Cadence Design Systems, Japan, Mirise tech corp, Renesas Electronics corp, Socionext inc., Synopsys Japan.
Top comment by OV
OK, there are quite a few gaps and clarifications needed for this article:
For starters: 'SoC' stands for system on chip. Chipmakers have normally only made one piece of a computer system, to be combined together on a circuit board. SoC integrates things onto one chip - CPU, memory, input/output terminals and more - that would not normally have been integrated like this. The figure from ASRA shows a SoC in the multimedia system, noting drawing and image processing as key duties
This is not software. It's computer hardware. The headline is wrong
This announcement is not particularly exciting. Some Japanese automakers are going to partner with some Japanese auto suppliers to make something that is not new. Both Denso and Panasonic are fabless companies, meaning that they might design chips but they get other companies to manufacture them
This next one may be a hill only I will die on, but when the article says 'at least 1,000 semiconductors used in each car nowadays', it's referring to semiconductor chips. My background is in semiconductor materials and the only semiconductor materials (families) in cars today are silicon, gallium arsenide and gallium nitride, with perhaps some silicon carbide in an EV traction inverter
Perhaps most importantly, different kinds of semiconductor devices need very different manufacturing techniques. A microprocessor, a transistor from a traction inverter and a headlight LED are very, very different. The media often conflates them, which is misleading
Toyota Motor senior fellow Keiji Yamoto is chair of the new research group. Nobuaki Kawahara, senior advisor at Denso, will serve as executive director.
Electrek’s Take
Japan is falling behind in the auto industry’s transition to EVs. The nation was topped by China this year as the number one auto exporter, with demand for electric vehicles climbing in key global markets.
China has gained an advantage with functional low-cost EVs like the BYD Dolphin, which are stealing the show from automakers that once dominated the region. Toyota’s sales are down 2% in China through November of this year, while other areas like Thailand (-6.5%) have slipped even more.
Industry leaders aim to help the Japanese auto industry compete with advanced software and ADAS. However, that won’t be coming until the end of the decade.
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