News briefing 
 

At the GTC 2021 technology conference, the major chip manufacturer, Nvidia, announced the launch of its automotive chip NVIDIA DRIVE Atlan that integrates AI and BlueField technologies.

Impact analysis 
 

As far as automotive applications are concerned, the characteristics of seeking stability over new technologies have rendered the choice to pursue new technologies in replacement of previous ones secondary. Take chip development as an example, even if the application of high-end chips is already under mass production for smartphones as chip technology expands to 5nm; the Orin series of 7nm will not show up until new car models are marketed in 2022, based on the product Roadmap of Nvidia, as well as the time schedule needed for development by car manufacturers. As for next-generation 5nm Atlan, chip manufacturers will only begin sending out samples in 2023 and lock on car models that will be marketed in 2025. Viewed from the point of view of the manufacturing process, although automobiles might not be as vigorous as smartphones in terms of pushing up the value of substrate, automotive applications do have their obvious advantages if perceived from the perspective of die size. For example, Xavier of 350nm2 is about 4.2 times that of Qualcomm Snapdragon 865. In addition, with the design of DRIVE AGX Pegasus™, the automotive computing platform requires a total of two Xavier and two NVIDIA Turing™ GPUs. This shows that the amount of high-end chips needed is a lot more than that of a highly integrated smartphone, not to mention many more chips are needed for entertainment systems in car technology. In conclusion, the contribution of automobiles to substrate in the future will, undoubtedly, be no less than that of smartphones.