Wuxi Indison Microelectronics Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Indison Microelectronics"), founded in 2017, has shown its edge and is focused on providing chips and solutions for vehicle-gauge serial-analog mixed signal processing. The special chips developed for selected vertical market segments are widely favored because of the integration of five modules, namely controller, actuator, power supply, signal chain and communication physical layer.

Why can Indi Microelectronics stand out from a number of domestic car gauge chip startups and become the first company to rapidly enter mass production and form a sales scale? From atmosphere light to tail light, matrix headlight, and the expansion of other product lines such as micro-motor, what logic does the construction of the micro-product system of Indison follow? What is the company's future vision? With these questions in mind, Jiwei.com had an in-depth dialogue with Zhuang Jian, the chairman and general manager of the company.

Focus on strategy, and successfully open up a own way

"Think independently and make a difference" is the motto of the company and the foundation and essence of the company's achievements today. It is also deeply integrated into the thinking of the underlying logic of the definition of chips, functional performance, and market positioning of the company.

As the founder of the company, Zhuang Jian has nearly 20 years of experience in the semiconductor industry. After graduating from Southeast University, he has successively worked in international IC factories such as Hitachi, Reisa, Etmel, and held important positions such as IC design engineer, technical support, product manager, and sales channel management. He has experienced the change of multiple downstream application scenarios of chips and the ups and downs of multiple cycles of semiconductors, Therefore, we have unique judgment and understanding of market trends and product definitions.

In the early days of the founding of the company, the company was ahead of the upswing of the semiconductor cycle and the arrival of the capital boom. In order to generate cash flow quickly and achieve self-reliance, the company chose to enter the field of medical device drive chips to test the water and feed the team, and simultaneously layout the research and development of vehicle gauge chips with high threshold and long introduction cycle. Zhuang Jian said: "Considering the small size and scale of the company, we hope to focus more on R&D manpower, product solutions, application market, etc. If we chose to make general MCU or separate components, it would be difficult to stand out if we didn't scale up, so we chose to make integrated driver chips."

After deciding to focus on the strategy, the company chose to enter the vertical market segment of the local automobile lighting and took the atmosphere light as the entry point. Asked about the reasons behind this choice, Zhuang Jian said, "It is well known that before this wave of car core shortage, many automotive chip fields in China were almost blank, and automotive electronics had very strict requirements for semiconductors, which was difficult to develop and mass produce, and the cycle was long. Therefore, it was very difficult for domestic manufacturers to enter the supply chain. For this reason, we need to select a segment that is easily accepted by automotive enterprises and has relatively low functional safety requirements as a stepping stone to open this gap On the one hand, I had already paid attention to this vertical field in Atmel at that time. Because lighting is closely related to design, personalization, etc., and the need for upgrading is very strong, and there are more opportunities for suppliers to enter. Therefore, we firmly chose the general direction of automobile lighting, and took the atmosphere lamp with strong design sense and lower safety level requirements as the entry point. ".

Time has proved the correctness of this choice. In addition, the company has a small number of teams with mature car scale chip R&D, operation and mass production capabilities in China, as well as the special process and special play method of analog-digital mixing. Since the first car scale chip was officially produced for commercial use in 2019 and formally introduced into the traditional passenger car supply chain in the same year, The large-scale mass production of the hybrid chip products in the field of vehicle-mounted light control has entered the supply chain of front-mounted vehicles of mainstream automobile enterprises, and has cooperated with more than 100 domestic and foreign automobile Tier1, covering the first and second line of traditional fuel vehicles and new energy vehicle brands.

After more than four years of low-key research and development, precise selection and steady operation, the company has finally ushered in a small breakthrough in the performance end under the opportunity of lack of car cores. Now the growth rate is still rising.

At the same time, up to now, Indi Microelectronics has accumulated a large number of mature IP of on-board analog-digital hybrid chips, and has excellent sales teams and channels at home and abroad. Through the chip positive innovative design+professional application support team feedback iteration mode, it has become a very few teams of analog-digital hybrid chips based on the special color process of car specification wafer, positive innovative design+high integration+high reliability, and has formed a high technical and market barrier.

Compared with international manufacturers, matrix headlamp products will enable local Tier1 to reshape the supply chain

While maintaining the cash-flow product market and building the core technology "moat", the product system of Indison Micro is also constantly improving and expanding. Along the general direction of automobile lighting, its tentacles extend from the atmosphere lamp to the field of automobile tail lamp and matrix headlamp (headlamp), and also expand to different product lines such as micro-motor and automobile chassis. Among them, the driving chip of the Intel Microprocessor's local matrix headlamp has the significance of connecting the past and the future. Because of the safety of driving and riding, the chip needs to withstand high current, withstand voltage, and withstand high temperature. It should not only meet the reliability standards of AEC-Q100, Grade 0, and other vehicle specifications, but also meet the ISO26262 standard process design, which also represents that the Intel Microprocessor has begun to forge ahead in the subdivision areas with higher functional safety requirements.

The history of headlamps is almost synchronized with that of automobiles. In the past hundred years, LED lamps have evolved to today, and their functions have expanded from the original lighting to the integration of safety, design and personalization. In recent years, with the penetration of new technology trends such as electrification and intellectualization of automobiles, and the driving force of new forces of car building on user experience, advanced LED matrix headlights have gradually gained recognition and favor from automobile enterprises and consumers because they are more intelligent and comfortable than ordinary LED headlights.

Zhuang Jian said that the focus of the matrix headlamp is the matrix control technology. Its core is to divide the far and low beam patterns into multiple areas with different numbers. The more areas are divided, the more light patterns can be combined, and the more complex intelligent lighting actions can be achieved. With the gradual increase of the divided areas and the continuous reduction of the area of a single area, the industry has begun to use the concept of "pixel" in display technology to refer to such areas. Each pixel can be activated separately, and the distribution of light can be controlled by ECU, and the LED in the specified area can be turned on and off automatically to fully realize digitization. This can not only create the best vision for drivers, but also avoid dazzling other road users, and help automakers improve the safety and comfort of vehicles to a new level, so it has unlimited potential in future vehicle lighting.

"At present, the market penetration rate of this matrix headlamp is less than 6%, and there are only three manufacturers providing mass production of important driver chips for this market in the world, including NXP, TI, and Indison Micro. As the only and first manufacturer in China, Indison Micro can compete with international manufacturers. At this stage, the driver chips have begun to be tested in many Tier1 production lines, including domestic and international, and we can ensure sufficient production capacity by working closely with upstream wafer manufacturers Should. " Zhuang Jian stressed.

In addition to achieving more precise and subtle control, the unique five-in-one drive chip of Indi Chip Micro can also bring many benefits to customers, which not only saves the area and power consumption of the chip on the board, but also saves the cost of customers' procurement and manufacturing, and improves the efficiency and know-how of chip application.

More importantly, the maturity of Indi Microelectronics will bring opportunities for local Tier1 to reshape the supply chain. In the past few years, overseas chip manufacturers have been locked in production capacity by international Tier1 and car manufacturers in advance, and local Tier1 has fully recognized the necessity and urgency of building a localization scheme. The rise of Indi Micro-Chip, as well as its advantages in the upstream supply chain fabs and packaging plants at home and abroad, will also build a stable supply chain for the localization scheme. It is understood that the company has reached strategic cooperation with the domestic car tier1 to jointly promote the development and implementation of the localization scheme. With the penetration of the market and the drive of the supply chain, we believe that this market has great potential in the future.

Aim to provide world-class analog-digital hybrid chip products

China is the forefront of electrification and intelligence, and domestic auto companies will also gradually occupy a relatively favorable position in the evolution of this round of auto E/E architecture from distribution to domain control to central integration, and even become market leaders, and auto semiconductor companies such as Intel Microelectronics will directly accept and benefit from this change.

Zhuang Jian said: "The reason why we entered the field of the local vehicle gauge drive chip is that we benefited from the upgrade of the E/E architecture of the car. The difference is that we generally saw the demand and change of the domain control master node for computing, but ignored the impact of this change on the peripheral devices. We opened a new way to focus on the demand of the smart edge node. At the domain control stage, some of the original 8-bit MCU around died out, and these weeks The analog-digital mixed nodes of the side still need to be placed close to the place where they are executed and perceived. They must integrate some communication functions and protocols to directly connect to the bus. Therefore, with the change of E/E architecture, there are more and more demands and applications in this area. "

Take automobile headlights as an example. In the upgrading from distributed architecture to domain control stage, the MCU in the original headlight controller died out, and became left and right domains. The left domain controlled the left lamp, and the right domain controlled the right lamp. There was no driver chip in the original headlights. However, due to the "pixelization" of automobile headlights now, it needs multiple driver chips, which communicate directly with the domain control "brain". These demands are rising exponentially.

Due to its unique forward-looking thinking and mature mass production and landing, Indison Micro has completed multiple rounds of financing, and is deeply favored by auto industry capital, such as Chang'an Anhe and Dongfeng Bank of Communications. Industrial capital can bring a lot of resources upstream and downstream of the industrial chain, further accelerating technological innovation and market-oriented landing.

At this stage, in addition to maintaining the market and technical barriers of the existing cash-flow products, Indi Micro will also launch new explosion points on some new vehicle-mounted applications every year. At present, based on the mature IP of a large number of on-board analog-digital hybrid chips, Indison Micro continues to expand on the basis of the original vehicle lighting, actively layout the driver-chip products of the chassis by wire and body domain control, and launch solutions involving the vehicle driving safety and functional control.

Speaking of the company's vision for the future, Zhuang Jian said: "The vision of the company is to grow into a global leader in analog-digital hybrid chips and solutions, to provide world-class analog-digital hybrid chip products to global customers, and to help customers make world-class system products."