On October 25, SiEngine announced that its 7nm autonomous driving chip called StarLight (or known as Xingchen-1 in Chinese / codename AD1000) was successfully lit up. The chip will be mass-produced in 2025 and deployed for automotive applications in 2026.
The chip “lights up” when the current passes through the chip smoothly, which means the chip is usable and can be mass-produced after subsequent testing and qualification.
SiEngine introduced the chip as satisfying the AEC-Q100 standard and has a heterogeneous multi-core architecture. The CPU computing power is 250K DMIPS and the NPU computing power is as high as 512 TOPS. The NPU also supports the Transformer-based network, which is a type of deep learning model used in natural language processing and other machine learning tasks. SiEngine also claimed that the StarLight can meet level 2 to level 4 autonomous driving technical needs.
In 2021, SiEngine released the Dragon Eagle-1, China’s first automotive-grade 7-nanometer system-on-chip (SoC) cockpit chip, which has an area of 83 mm², 8.8 billion transistors, 87 layers of circuits, an 8-core CPU, 14-core GPU, programmable NPU, ISP, VPU, and DSP clusters. Later that year in December, SiEngine announced that the Dragon Eagle-1 was deployed on more than 200,000 vehicles. Furthermore, from January to September this year, the Dragon Eagle-1 was the best-selling domestic cockpit chip in China, according to Gaogong Industry Institue. Co. Ltd. (GGII). Established in 2006, GGII is a consulting agency focusing on emerging industries such as electric vehicles, batteries, robots, and smart cars.
About SiEngine
SiEngine was jointly established by ECARX and Arm China in the Wuhan Economic and Technological Development Zone in 2018, focusing on the design, development, and sales of advanced automotive electronic chips. ECARX is an automotive technology provider co-founded by Eric Li (Li Shufu), who is also the founder and chairman of Geely, in 2017.
In addition to the StarLight autonomous driving chip, SiEngine is also developing its second-generation smart cockpit chip as the Dragon Eagle-1’s successor, which is set to launch simultaneously at the same time as the StarLight.
Source: SiEngine, Eet-China, Cls
