Gasgoo Munich-On September 16, Shanghai hosted The 6th Automotive Semiconductor Ecosystem Conference 2026, organized by Gasgoo. Under the theme "Chips Gathering Ecosystem, Intelligence Opening Future," the event focused on computing power reconstruction, the RISC-V open ecosystem, cabin-driving fusion, and supply chain security. During the session, Gasgoo Partner and Executive Vice President Gu Xiaoying delivered a keynote outlining the current state and future trajectory of the automotive chip industry.Gu Xiaoying | Partner and Executive Vice President, GasgooAs electrification, connectivity, and intelligence accelerate, the number and value of chips per vehicle continue to climb, Gu noted. A pure electric vehicle with Level 3 conditional autonomous driving requires 200 to 300 more chips than a Level 1 internal combustion engine vehicle, representing a 124% increase in value. The most significant jumps in chip count are found in computing, storage, and power semiconductors.Gu offered a forecast: the global automotive chip market is expected to grow from $67.7 billion in 2024 to $96.9 billion in 2029, achieving a compound annual growth rate of 7.4%."The industry will shift from growth in chip volume to growth in the value of individual chips," Gu emphasized. "Smart driving and cockpit SoCs, advanced memory, and silicon carbide are driving the bulk of this increase." She argued that future growth will be structural rather than across-the-board: high-performance chips with high computing power and bandwidth will continue to gain value, while mature categories enter a phase of diversified supply, price competition, and supply chain consolidation.In the microcontroller (MCU) segment, the top five vendors are projected to hold roughly 92% of the global automotive market in 2025, with Infineon’s share climbing to 36%. Domestic companies have already achieved scale in body control, lighting, and seating, and are now expanding into high-safety, high-performance scenarios like battery management systems (BMS), electric drives, chassis, and zone controllers.According to Gasgoo’s configuration database, Nvidia captured 40% of the domestic smart driving domain controller installations from January to July 2026. Huawei Ascend and Horizon Robotics maintained steady growth, while NIO and XPENG made the list by mass-producing vehicles with their self-developed chips. In the cockpit SoC market, Qualcomm holds a 70% share, with Huawei, SiEngine, MediaTek, and Xinqs (SemiDrive) seeing steady gains. The storage market remains dominated by Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron. However, local players like CXMT, Ingenic, Longsys, Biwin, and GigaDevice are positioning themselves for mass production of high-speed, high-capacity products, with CXMT already possessing wafer fabrication capabilities.Looking ahead, Gu highlighted three major trends. First, cross-domain integration is accelerating as the industry moves from "multiple chips per domain" to "one chip for multiple uses." Cabin-parking fusion is now widely applied in mainstream models, single-chip cabin-driving integration has hit the road, and multi-domain central fusion is in its introductory phase. Second, RISC-V has entered a period of rapid development. Third, Chiplets are becoming a critical breakthrough for high-performance SoCs, offering improved yields and reduced design complexity and manufacturing costs—though power consumption, latency, and verification remain challenges to overcome.Regarding RISC-V, she stressed: "For RISC-V to develop at high speed, it doesn't actually depend on the open instruction set itself. It depends on unified standards, a robust toolchain, the ability to pass verification quickly, and whether leading automakers or Tier 1 suppliers are willing to take the lead. This is an ecosystem-building issue, not purely one of an open instruction set."
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