Gasgoo Munich-On September 16, The 6th Automotive Semiconductor Ecosystem Conference 2026—hosted by Gasgoo—opened in Shanghai. There, Black Sesame Technologies product expert Erite took the stage to outline the company’s strategy for cockpit-driving fusion and share his take on the industry’s direction.Erite | Black Sesame Technologies, Product ExpertErite drew a parallel between today’s auto sector and the evolution of the smartphone market. Flagship devices, he noted, grab the bulk of the headlines, yet it’s the highly homogenized volume models that actually move the needle on sales. The same dynamic plays out in cars. "Whether it’s VLA, AI boxes, end-to-end, or world models, those technologies capture 80% to 90% of the market’s attention," he said, even though the feature sets on flagship vehicles are far from settled.In volume sellers, however, chip configurations are fragmented. There are four or five options for the cockpit and another four or five for intelligent driving, creating dozens of possible hardware combinations for a single model. "Swapping a chip means repeating all the work you’ve already done," Erite said. "It’s reinventing the wheel."To address that pain point, Black Sesame introduced the C1296, part of its Wudang series of cross-domain fusion chips. "Others care if you fly high; Black Sesame cares if you’re tired," Erite remarked. The C1296 is designed to handle varying cockpit-to-driving ratios on volume models using a single piece of silicon. By collapsing a supply chain that once required a dozen or more chip combinations down to one platform, the chip cuts costs at the architectural level. The C1296 has already entered mass production on Dongfeng Motor’s Tianyuan intelligent driving platform.Black Sesame’s product matrix relies on a dual-track approach: the Huashan series for ADAS and the Wudang series for cross-domain fusion. Erite emphasized that Black Sesame is among the few vendors offering such a matrix. The chips support P2P compatibility and share a common toolchain, helping automakers slash redundant software and hardware investments across different vehicle tiers.The company’s latest flagship, the A2000, features a "Jiushao architecture" NPU. It is one of the few automotive-grade NPUs on the market using an ASIC design that supports floating-point calculations, enabling Level 3 and above autonomous driving and handling large models like VLA. Looking ahead, Black Sesame has mapped out a full roadmap: existing applications in the near term, cross-domain fusion and high-level driving in the medium term, and centralized computing platforms in the long run.
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