Tesla Semiconductors?

[TruckElectric]

According to FT Tesla is exploring buying a semiconductor plant to ensure supply.

I had pondered the idea of Tesla buying a chip factory/foundry as part of their vertical integration strategy last year.

Interesting possibilities what Tesla could become as a company.



Tesla set to pay for chips in advance in bid to overcome shortage

Electric-car maker also explores buying foundry but analysts warn of high costs


Tesla is set to take the unusual step of paying in advance for chips to secure its supply of the crucial materials and is also exploring buying a plant as part of efforts to overcome the global shortage, according to people familiar with the matter.

https://www.ft.com/content/49459668-7eab-4589-8338-059e06b9fd8a

 

[TruckElectric]

Tesla Reportedly Looking to Secure Its Own Chip Stash
Tesla is reportedly on the hunt to secure its own stash of semiconductor chips amid a global shortage that has hammered the global auto industry.

M. COREY GOLDMANUPDATED:MAY 27, 2021 10:18 AM EDTORIGINAL:MAY 27, 2021


Tesla (TSLA) - Get Report reportedly is on a global hunt to secure its own stash of semiconductor chips amid the ongoing shortage that has hammered the electric vehicle company and the rest of the auto industry.

The Financial Times reported that Tesla was looking into various options to secure much-needed chips that are critical to making its cars run, including paying in advance for supplies and even potentially buying its own plant.

Tesla is trying to secure chips with companies in Taiwan and South Korea, which make the newer generation models of chips that it needs, as well as with companies in the U.S., according to the Financial Times, which cited industry sources.

As for buying a plant outright, sources told the FT that those plans were in a much earlier stage, given such an effort would require significantly more time and capital.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is no stranger to the concept of shunning global supply chains, having produced the world’s first mass-produced fleet of battery-powered vehicles almost entirely in-house by spending billions on production and billions more on sourcing raw materials for its batteries.

The electric carmaker last fall reportedly secured its own lithium mining rights in Nevada after dropping a plan to buy a company there. That followed an announcement last June that it struck a deal to buy cobalt, another key ingredient in batteries, from Baar, Switzerland-based Glencore, the world’s biggest cobalt miner.

At the same time, the world’s biggest electric vehicle maker has competitors like Ford (F) - Get Report and others nipping at its heels, boosting pressure to keep its current pace of production going.

Ford on Wednesday said it will boost its investment in electric vehicles to at least $30 billion by 2025, and will create a new division called "Ford Pro" that will focus on commercial vehicles and government customers.

TheStreet founder and Jim Cramer and the Action Alerts Plus team noted in a report this week that Ford has been labeled “… a lesser, legacy auto OEM that was light years behind Tesla. But as we now know, that has proven to be a false narrative.”

We like Ford for the long term and see it as the cheapest way to play the current bull market in autos and industry transition to electric vehicles,” the AAP team said.

At the same time, from a technical perspective, Tesla is looking oversold, according to Real Money contributor Bruce Kamich.

“Tesla is oversold according to the slow stochastic indicator,” Kamich wrote. “The pace of the decline has slowed when we look at our momentum study. Tesla is poised for some sort of turnaround or rebound. Be nimble.”


SOURCE: The Street

 

[TruckElectric]

Tesla Looks To Get Ahead Of Chip Shortage With Advance Payments, Mulls Buying A Plant: FT

Rachit Vats , Benzinga Staff Writer

Tesla Inc TSLA 0.05% is exploring options to stay ahead of the ongoing global chip shortage, including making advanced payments and buying a fabricating plant, the Financial Times reported Wednesday.

What Happened: The Elon Musk-led electric automaker is in talks with industry operators in Taiwan, South Korea and the United States to secure chip capacities, FT noted — citing people familiar with the matter. Most of its new generation mass-production chips are made mainly in Taiwan and South Korea.

According to the report, in an unusual practice, some contract chipmakers are now accepting advance deposits from large customers to guarantee certain orders at a fixed price.

Contract chipmakers have traditionally been flexible with fulfilling various customer orders — big or small — to ensure a stream of profit.

Talks to buy a fab facility are in the early stages and such an acquisition may be tough given the high costs involved, the report said. A semiconductor lab needs up to $20 billion investment.

“They will buy capacity at first, but they are actively considering buying their own foundry,” Seraph Consulting CEO Ambrose Conroy said, as per FT.

Seraph Consulting is a supply chain consultancy for Tesla.

Why It Matters: The ongoing global chip shortage has forced automakers across the world to halt production lines, make their most profitable models first. The shortage is also hitting consumer electronics companies including Apple Inc AAPL 0.9%.

The lingering shortage has forced suppliers and chip equipment makers to recommend updating the traditional just-in-time auto supply chain model first adopted by Toyota Motor Corp TM 0.79%.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co TSM 0.24% and Applied Materials Inc AMAT 0.43% last week said the industry needs to modernize its “Just-in-time” supply chain practices to avoid a similar semiconductor shortage as the ongoing one in the future


SOURCE: BENZINGER

 

[TruckElectric]

TSMC ramping up output for automotive MCUs

TSMC has disclosed it is ramping up its output for automotive microcontrollers (MCU) for 2021, which will be 60% higher than in 2020.

TSMC has taken "unprecedented" actions to help auto vendors, including the rescheduling of production capacity demanded by customers in other sectors who have also seen their supplies constrained, the Taiwan-based foundry indicated.

TSMC will continue to work with the auto supply chain to deal with the current chip shortage, the foundry said.

TSMC continued it will implement a more effective method to manage and monitor inventory throughout the entire supply chain, so that demand visibility can be more predictable. The moves are to prevent such chip shortage from happening in the future.

TSMC CEO CC Wei said previously that the shortage of automotive chips would be greatly reduced starting the second quarter of this year. In January, TSMC already expressed its commitment to supporting its automotive customers.


SOURCE: DigiTimes Asia

 

[TruckElectric]

Tesla's next acquisition?


Tesla supplier Delta Electronics invests $7M in AI chip startup Kneron

Rita Liao@ritacyliao / 11:51 PM CDT•May 5, 2021

Image Credits: Kneron

Despite a persistent semiconductor shortage that is disrupting the global automotive industry, investors remain bullish on the chips used to power next-generation vehicles.

Kneron, a startup that develops semiconductors to give devices artificial intelligence capabilities by using edge computing, just got funded by Delta Electronics, a Taiwanese supplier of power components for Apple and Tesla. The $7 million investment boosts the startup’s total financing to over $100 million to date.

As part of the deal, Kneron also agreed to buy Vatics, a part of Delta Electronics’ subsidiary Vivotek, for $10 million in cash. The new assets nicely complement Kneron’s business as the startup extends its footprint to the booming smart car industry.

Vatics, an image signal processing provider, has been selling system on a chip (SoC) and intellectual property to manufacturers of surveillance, consumer and automotive products for many years across the United States and China.

Headquartered in San Diego with a development force in Taipei, Kneron has emerged in recent years as a challenge to AI chip incumbents like Intel and Google. Its chips boast low-power consumption and enable data processing directly on the chips using the startup’s proprietary software, a departure from solutions that require data to be computed through powerful cloud centers and sent back to devices.

The approach has won Kneron a list of heavyweight backers, including strategic investor Foxconn, Qualcomm, Sequoia Capital, Alibaba and Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures.

Kneron has designed chips for scenarios ranging from manufacturing, smart homes, smartphones, robotics, surveillance and payments to autonomous driving. In the automotive field, it has struck partnerships with Foxconn and Otus, a supplier for Honda and Toyota.

Following the acquisition, Vatics executives will join Kneron to lead its surveillance and security camera division. The merged teams will jointly develop surveillance and automotive products for Kneron going forward. Image signal processors, coupled with neural processing units, are helpful in detecting objects and ensuring the safety of automated cars.

“This acquisition will allow us to offer full-stack AI solutions, along with our current class-leading NPUs [neural processing units], and will significantly speed up our go-to-market strategy,” said Kneron’s founder and CEO, Albert Liu.



SOURCE: TechCrunch




Kneron Enters ADAS Aftermarket with AI Chips

US- and Taiwan-based AI accelerator chip startup Kneron has entered the automotive market with strategic partnerships on aftermarket ADAS systems and a new strategic investor. With this move, the company intends to break into the notoriously difficult automotive sector.

Automotive is tough to break into for chip startups without years of reliability data available to prove their chips meet stringent requirements. On top of this, design cycles are long and startups without other revenue streams can’t afford to wait multiple years until vehicles go into production to start making revenues.

Kneron CEO Albert Liu told EE Times that Asian vehicle OEMs are just as difficult for startups to break into as their US and European counterparts.

Albert Liu (Source: Kneron)
“This is why we’re starting with the aftermarket,” he said. “As for our approach, we’ve been building revenue streams in the AIoT market and proving our products in vehicles. We’ve been building our reputation and record with channel markets.”
This is not Kneron’s first move in automotive. At the beginning of 2021, Kneron announced a strategic partnership with Taiwanese CEM Foxconn, where the companies will collaborate on AI use cases for Industry 4.0 and automotive through Foxconn’s MIH electric vehicle (EV) platform. MIH is an open software and hardware platform intended to lower the barriers to entry into the EV industry. Foxconn also made a strategic investment in Kneron at the time.

Strategic partnerships
Kneron’s two new strategic partnerships are both also with Taiwanese companies.

The first is with Weltrend, a fabless semiconductor company covering markets from signal processing to motor control to data security, and Elan/Avisonic, a human-machine interface company.

The three companies have been working on an ADAS system using Weltrend’s smart camera chip which handles optical flow algorithms, combined with Kneron’s KL520 AI accelerator chip which runs Elan/Avisonic’s AI image processing algorithm.

The Weltrend chip is responsible for the optical flow. Algorithms running on this chip consider a number of fixed points on an image and determine whether these points are moving closer or further from the camera in subsequent images. An alarm can be sounded if an object is within a bounded safety range of the vehicle, and/or the object is getting closer to the vehicle.

Adding Weltrend’s optical technology to the system increased detection accuracy by 70% in trials; the added detection accuracy decreases false alarms. The camera system can also be used to monitor driver behavior and detect traffic hazards.

Kneron’s KL520 (Source: Kneron)
The results of this collaboration will be used for aftermarket ADAS parking systems, such as cameras that consumers can place above their license plates or on their rear-view mirror.
“Our ADAS is not designed directly into a vehicle through an OEM, instead it reaches businesses and consumers through channel markets,” Liu said. “For businesses, it helps in fleet management – for public transport companies to monitor driver behavior or detect potential traffic hazards. Some of the projects most eagerly demanding these safety precautions include school bus projects.”
As part of this deal, Weltrend has also made a strategic investment in Kneron of undisclosed amount.
A second strategic partnership with camera solutions provider Otus has seen Otus’ 360° dashboard camera upgraded with the addition of the KL520. The camera system can now identify objects in the vehicle’s vicinity and alert the driver if necessary.
Industrial grade
The KL520 is Kneron’s first-generation AI accelerator chip, launched in May 2019. It offers 0.3 TOPS and consumes 0.5 W (0.6 TOPS/W). While the KL520 is not automotive qualified, it is an industrial grade chip, said Liu.
“Industrial grade is more than sufficient for [automotive] aftermarket applications based on all the current customer requests and specifications that we have seen,” he said.
Regarding reliability, the company currently has 6 months of test data from ongoing trials of KL520-equipped aftermarket systems installed in vehicles on the road.


SOURCE: EE TIMES

 

[TruckElectric]

Will Tesla be next?



Bosch is the new star in Silicon Saxony microchip cluster

Chipmakers in Dresden, Germany, are reacting to soaring demand for semiconductors by expanding their production facilities in what's come to be called Silicon Saxony. Bosch is the latest to join the frenzy on the ground.

Wafers from Bosch's new plant in Dresden will be the basis for new intelligent chips for the automotive sector

Engineering and technology company Bosch adds a star to its firmament next week with the opening of a new semiconductor plant just north of Dresden, in the German state of Saxony.

The firm has pumped about €1 billion ($1.2 billion) into its new site, marking the biggest single investment in its 130-year history.

Construction work kicked off in the summer of 2018 on an area as big as 14 football fields. As early as last November, some basic parts of the technology already in place completed an automated manufacturing cycle for the first time.

"Our semiconductor facility in Dresden is Bosch's first AIoT factory, combining artificial intelligence (AI) with the Internet of Things (IoT)," Bosch spokesperson Annett Fischer told DW. "We can thus rely on a continuous data-based improvement of production, setting new Industry 4.0 standards."

When the semiconductor fabrication plant (commonly called a fab, sometimes foundry) reaches its full capacity before the end of 2021, it's expected to provide jobs for up to 700 people who will control and monitor production as well as maintain the machinery. Until then, several microchip and integrated circuit prototypes need to be subjected to further extensive testing before they can be delivered to customers.

Bosch is the latest renowned company to move into Silicon Saxony

"All the machines — approximately 100 — and installations in the clean room are connected electronically and are hooked up to the whole infrastructure via a data center," Annett Fischer explained. "For that, some 300 kilometers (186 miles) of data lines had to be laid."

The silicon chips from Bosch are tiny, but they contain very complex circuits that can enable several millions of individual electronic functions. The company's focus is on the production of automotive chips, with the car industry in Europe having experienced a dire shortage of such semiconductors as the coronavirus pandemic keeps disrupting global supply chains.

Silicon Saxony on the march
Bosch's new plant will add to the larger Dresden area's reputation as one of Europe's most significant microelectronics hubs. It has come to be called Silicon Saxony in a nod to its much bigger brother, Silicon Valley, in the US.

Silicon Saxony is also the name of an industry association on the ground. Its managing director, Frank Bösenberg, told the DPA news agency earlier this month that the Dresden semiconductor chip technology cluster had "seen continuous growth since 2009," mentioning some 2,300 companies with roughly 60,000 employees active in the industry in Saxony and generating revenues of some €16.5 billion last year.

Robots are indispensable helpers in Bosch's production of wafers and microchips in its Dresden plant

Several big players already on the ground are currently planning to invest a lot more to boost production in response to the rising demand for chips.

US chipmaker Globalfoundries, which absorbed the former AMD Saxony in Dresden, has said it's willing to spend €400 million on expanding its clean rooms. The firm boasts an output of 400,000 wafers a year right now and hopes to double this soon.

Further investments of €1.1 billion in its Dresden facilities over the next five years have been announced by Infineon, a Munich-based listed DAX company and another world leader in microelectronics.

In addition, Silicon Saxony executives hope semiconductor giant Intel may also join the Dresden cluster as the company is currently on the lookout for a suitable European location to invest billions of dollars.

"We are among Europe's largest semiconductor-producing locations," Silicon Saxony chief Frank Bösenberg told German public broadcaster MDR. "This concentration of similar industry players should give us a competitive edge."

The Dresden microelectronics cluster is something of an outlier in Europe, with the only significant competitor being the larger Grenoble area in France with a similar density of chipmakers, engineering companies and research institutions.

On the right track?
There's been much talk lately of the European Union wanting to become less dependent on North American and Asian microchip deliveries, and Brussels is willing to shell out billions to get the job done by co-funding more European production plants.

Jan-Peter Kleinhans, project director Technology and Geopolitics at the think tank Stiftung Neue Verantwortung (SNV) in Berlin told DW that policymakers in the EU believe building more fabs here would once and for all avoid future supply strains and make the bloc a lot less dependent on chips from abroad.

Globalfoundries has played a major part in boosting Silicon Saxony's reputation as a European hub for chip production

"But this doesn't work out as even TSMC in Taiwan (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) cannot produce any chips completely on its own," he said. "The firm depends on a huge network of suppliers and needs production equipment from the US, Japan and the Netherlands, chemicals from South Korea and Japan as well as silicon from abroad — so it would be naive to believe that we could be truly independent just because we have the fabs."

Kleinhans added that he did not at all intend to play down the importance of the most recent investments in Silicon Saxony and Bosch's new plant in particular, emphasizing that "Bosch can rightly say it's now got a state-of-the-art fab for power electronics in Dresden for the automotive portfolio it's been specializing in."

He warned, though, that in other chip sectors that are also important for the EU economy, European producers were ill-positioned and had fallen behind in terms of manufacturing processes and chip design.

"We cannot hold a candle to the US and other competitors when it comes to processors for smartphones, laptops or cloud datacenters — almost none of those come from European players," Kleinhans noted.

How microchips became the 'oil of the digital age'




SOURCE: DW

 

[TruckElectric]

Bosch building one of world’s most modern chip factories
AUTO COMPONENTS
By Autocar Pro News Desk , 02 Jun 2021

German Tier 1 supplier Bosch is building the chip factory of the future in Dresden. Manufacturing of automotive microchips will be a primary focus when Bosch’s fully digital and highly connected semiconductor plant is up and running.

The company already operates a semiconductor fab in Reutlingen near Stuttgart. Bosch says the new wafer fab in Dresden is its response to the surging number of areas of application for semiconductors. The Tier 1 is investing around a billion euros (Rs 8,267 crore) in the high-tech manufacturing facility, which is said to be one of the most advanced wafer fabs in the world. Start of production is slated for July 2021.

300-millimeter fab
The technology in focus at Bosch’s new Dresden facility is 300-millimeter fabrication, in which a single wafer can accommodate 31,000 individual chips. Compared with conventional 150- and 200-millimeter wafers, this technology offers the company greater economies of scale and boosts its competitiveness in semiconductor production. Moreover, fully automated production and real-time data exchange between the machines will make chip manufacturing in Dresden exceptionally efficient.

In the world of semiconductors, the term 'wafer' means a circular disc made of a material such as silicon. In what is known as a drawing process, a round monocrystal – the ingot – is created from extremely hot liquid silicon. The ingot may be 300 millimeters in diameter and more than one meter long. This cylinder is then sawed into discs – the raw wafers. These discs are thinner than a millimeter. In a manufacturing process lasting up to several month, these discs are turned into semiconductor chips.

Electronically connected, highly automated production
All the roughly 100 machines and lines in the 10,000-square-metre cleanroom are electronically connected – with each other and with the complex building infrastructure by means of a central database. To make this possible, 300 kilometres of data lines were laid. Such a setup allows as many as 1,000 data channels to be recorded for each machine in real time, and relayed to a server in the plant.

This centralised data architecture in the wafer fab is one of the biggest strengths of the new Bosch plant. Taken together, the production data generated is equivalent to 500 pages of text per second. In just one day, this would be equivalent to more than 42 million pages weighing 22 metric tons. One of the things this wealth of data allows is the ability to pinpoint at any time where each individual wafer is in the production process, where it is going next, and when it will arrive. The wafers are transported from machine to machine by a completely automatic system featuring individual pods known as FOUPs (front opening unified pods). Each FOUP can transport up to 25 wafers. There is no longer any manual transportation at all.

First AIoT factory
The Dresden wafer fab is Bosch’s first AIoT factory. AIoT stands for the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT). With this, Bosch is creating a sound basis for data-driven, continuous improvement in production, and setting new standards for Industry 4.0.

Artificial intelligence methods can be used to evaluate the data generated in the wafer fab. For example, an AI algorithm can detect even the tiniest anomalies in products. These anomalies are visible on the wafer surface in the form of specific error patterns known as signatures. Their causes are immediately analyzed and deviations from the process corrected without delay, even before they can affect the reliability of the product. This is the key to further improving the manufacturing processes and semiconductor quality, as well as to achieving a high level of process stability. In turn, it means that semiconductor products can go into full-scale production quickly.

Furthermore, AI algorithms can precisely predict whether and when a piece of manufacturing machinery or a robot needs maintenance or adjustment. In other words, such work is not done according to a rigid schedule, but precisely when it is needed – and well in advance of any problems cropping up. AI is also used in production scheduling, saving time and costs as it guides the wafers through several hundred processing steps at roughly 100 machines in the plant.

Plant with ‘digital twin’
There are two Dresden wafer fabs – one in the real world, and one in the digital world. Experts call this a ‘digital twin’. During construction, all parts of the factory and all relevant construction data relating to the plant as a whole were recorded digitally and visualised in a three-dimensional model. The twin comprises roughly half a million 3D objects, including buildings and infrastructure, supply and disposal systems, cable ducts and ventilation systems, and machinery and manufacturing lines. This allows Bosch to simulate both process optimization plans and renovation work without intervening in ongoing operations. Moreover, any new machinery is always delivered to the plant twice – once in the real world and once as a data model.

SOURCE: AUTOCAR PROFESSIONAL




Bosch reaches milestone on the way to opening new wafer fab

This is a key step toward the start of production operations in Dresden, Germany, which is scheduled for late 2021

Bosch semiconductor manufacturing in Dresden

It is a milestone on the path to the chip factory of the future: at the new Bosch semiconductor fab in Dresden, silicon wafers are passing through the fully automated fabrication process for the first time.

This is a key step toward the start of production operations, which is scheduled for late 2021.

Manufacturing of automotive microchips will be a primary focus when the fully digital and highly connected semiconductor plant is up and running. "Chips for tomorrow's mobility solutions and greater safety on our roads will soon be produced in Dresden. We plan to open our chip factory of the future before the year is out," said Harald Kroeger, member of the board of management of Robert Bosch.

The company already operates a semiconductor fab in Reutlingen near Stuttgart. The new wafer fab in Dresden is Bosch's response to the surging number of areas of application for semiconductors, as well as a renewed demonstration of its commitment to Germany as a high-tech location.

Bosch is investing around one billion euros in the high-tech manufacturing facility, which will be one of the most advanced wafer fabs in the world. Funding for the new building is being provided by the federal German government, and more specifically the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. Bosch plans to officially open its wafer fab in June 2021.

Prototype manufacturing already underway
In January 2021, Bosch began putting its first wafers through the fabrication process in Dresden. From these, the company will make power semiconductors for use in applications such as DC-DC converters in electric and hybrid vehicles.

In the six weeks it takes to produce the wafers, they undergo some 250 individual fabrication steps - all of which are fully automated. In the process, minute structures with dimensions measuring fractions of a micrometer are deposited on the wafers. These microchip prototypes can now be installed and tested in electronic components for the first time.

In March, Bosch will start the first production runs of highly complex integrated circuits. To make the wafers into the finished semiconductor chips, they undergo some 700 processing steps, which take more than ten weeks to complete.

300-millimeter fab
The technology in focus at Bosch's new Dresden facility is 300-millimetre fabrication, in which a single wafer can accommodate 31,000 individual chips. Compared with conventional 150- and 200-millimetre wafers, this technology offers the company greater economies of scale and boosts its competitiveness in semiconductor production.

Moreover, fully automated production and real-time data exchange between the machines will make chip manufacturing in Dresden exceptionally efficient. "Our new wafer fab sets standards in automation, digitalization, and connectivity," Kroeger says.

Construction of the facility began in June 2018 on a plot of land measuring some 100,000 sqm, or roughly 14 soccer fields.

It is located in Silicon Saxony, Dresden's answer to Silicon Valley.

In late 2019, the outer shell of the high-tech factory was completed, providing 72,000 sqm of floor space.

Work then began on the interior and the first production machinery was installed in the cleanroom. In November 2020, initial parts of this highly sophisticated fabrication technology completed a brief automated manufacturing cycle for the first time.

The final construction phase will see up to 700 people working in the Dresden fab to control and monitor production and maintain the machinery.

"Our new wafer fab sets standards in automation, digitalisation, and connectivity," explained Kroeger

From wafer to chip
Semiconductors are finding their way into more and more applications, including in the internet of things and for mobility of the future.

The semiconductor fabrication process begins with round discs of silicon known as wafers. At the Bosch fab in Dresden, these wafers have a diameter of 300 millimetres and, at just 60 micrometres thick, will be thinner than a human hair.

To produce the coveted semiconductor chips, the untreated - or "bare" - wafers are then processed for several weeks. As the application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) in vehicles, for instance, these semiconductors act as the vehicle's brains. They process the information from sensors and trigger further actions, such as sending a lightning-fast message to the airbag to tell it to deploy.

Although the silicon chips measure just a few square millimetres, they contain complex circuits, sometimes featuring several millions of individual electronic functions.


SOURCE: CLEANROOM TECHNOLOGY

 

[TruckElectric]

 

[TruckElectric]