General Motors Co (GM) President Mark Reuss said on Thursday that the company will co-develop semiconductors with several producers to make chips that can handle more electronic features in its vehicles, a revamp of strategy that comes as a shortage of chips disrupts the global auto industry.
GM currently uses a wide assortment of semiconductors in its cars. It now plans to reduce the types of chips it uses to just three families of semiconductors over the next several years. That would reduce the variety of chips GM orders by 95 percent, making it easier for producers to fulfill the company’s needs and boosting margins, Reuss said at the Barclays Auto Conference.
Reuss said that GM needs to cut down on semiconductor complexity because the rapid increase in high-tech functions in its new models, along with the company’s rapid push toward electric vehicles, means the automaker needs a greater amount of chips.
“We see the semiconductor requirements more than doubling over the next several years as the vehicles we produce become more of a technology platform,” Reuss said.
GM will be working to develop the chips with Qualcomm Inc, STMicroelectronics NV, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), Renesas Electronics Corp, ON Semiconductor Corp, NXP Semiconductors NV and Infineon Technologies AG, Reuss said.
The Detroit automaker last month reported its third-quarter sales fell 33 percent and profits were almost half what they were a year ago because of lost production due to a lack of chips. GM CEO Mary Barra said last month that she expects the semiconductor shortage to last into the second half of next year.
Separately, Ford Motor Co, responding to a global semiconductor shortage that has crimped profits and production, plans to explore buying chips directly from GlobalFoundries Inc.
The automaker said on Thursday that it is forming a “strategic collaboration” with GlobalFoundries, which went public in a US$2.6 billion listing last month and recently moved its headquarters from California to Malta, New York, where it is expanding a foundry to add capacity.
“If everything progresses as we hope, Ford and GlobalFoundries will team up to grow the supply for Ford’s current vehicle lineup, and also do R&D work together,” said Chuck Gray, vice president of embedded software and controls for the Dearborn, Michigan-based automaker. “It’s an important step in our plans to vertically integrate key technologies.”
The chip shortage has dented profits at automakers including Ford, and cost the global auto industry US$210 billion in lost production, according to the consulting firm Alix Partners. The crisis has also forced auto executives to rethink their supply-chain strategies and consider in-house chip design as computing and software become central to modern vehicles.
DIVERSIFICATION: The chip designer expects new non-smartphone products to be available next year or in 2025 as it seeks new growth engines to broaden its portfolio MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday said it expects non-mobile phone chips, such as automotive chips, to drive its growth beyond 2025, as it pursues diversification to create a more balanced portfolio. The Hsinchu-based chip designer said it has counted on smartphone chips, power management chips and chips for other applications to fuel its growth in the past few years, but it is developing new products to continue growing. “Our future growth drivers, of course, will be outside of smartphones,” MediaTek chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) told shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting in Hsinchu City. “As new products would be available next year
At a red-brick factory in the German port city of Hamburg, cocoa bean shells go in one end and out the other comes an amazing black powder with the potential to counter climate change. The substance, dubbed biochar, is produced by heating the cocoa husks in an oxygen-free room to 600°C. The process locks in greenhouse gases and the final product can be used as a fertilizer, or as an ingredient in the production of “green” concrete. While the biochar industry is still in its infancy, the technology offers a novel way to remove carbon from the Earth’s atmosphere, experts have said. Biochar could
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) shares yesterday rallied 2 percent on the local stock market after Nvidia Corp said the contract chipmaker would be the sole supplier of its latest graphics processing chip, defusing speculation that Intel Corp would get a share of the orders. TSMC’s share price climbed to NT$562, snapping a three-day losing streak. It outperformed the benchmark index’s 1.18 percent gain. Net purchases by foreign institutional investors yesterday totaled 8.37 million shares, reversing net sales of 2.9 million shares on Thursday. The rebound follows Nvidia’s announcement that its latest artificial intelligence graphics processing unit (GPU), codenamed H100, would
Taiwan is expected to be the third-largest market for Singapore-based DBS Group Holdings Ltd, after DBS Bank Taiwan (星展台灣) completes its acquisition of Citibank Taiwan Ltd’s (台灣花旗) consumer banking business in August, a bank executive said yesterday. Taiwan would rank after only Singapore and Hong Kong in terms of profit contribution to DBS, followed by China, India and Indonesia, DBS Taiwan general manager Ng Sier Han (黃思翰) told a media briefing in Taipei. DBS Bank Taiwan expects to retain all 2.77 million Citibank Taiwan cardholders and help them to transition to DBS Taiwan cards over the next 12 months, Ng said. The bank