Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon Ride Flex System-on-Chip super-compute family on Thursday to be used by carmakers for integrating sensing and other functions for digital cockpit, automated driving, autonomous driving, networking and computer vision.
The Flex SoC was announced at the company’s first Automotive Investor Day where CEO Cristiano Amon said its automotive design win pipeline is now $30 billion, an increase from $19 billion announced just two months ago. Design wins run across chips it will sell to carmakers to power the digital chassis, cockpit and other functions and will result in revenues to Qualcomm in the next four years.
“We are winning the digital future of automotive,” Amon claimed during an in-person event in New York that was also streamed online.
Qualcomm also estimated the total addressable market for automotive chips and licenses will reach $100 billion by 2030, with revenue growth in automotive technology reaching $1.3 billion in fiscal year 2022 then rising to $4 billion in 2026 and greater than $9 billion in 2031.
By comparison, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang earlier this week at GTC Fall said its design win pipeline for Orin chips used in automotive and robotics has reached $11 billion on the pathway to doubling each year with more than $1 billion in revenues a year. Intel Mobileye is the third big competitor in the chip space for automotive and has not recently released its pipeline of contracts.
Nvidia also announced a Drive Thor SoC at GTC to centralize car compute functions that will be produced in 2024 for use in cars in 2025.
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Neither company offered many details about Drive Thor or Ride Flex. Nvidia showed off a close-up photo of its Thor SoC, while Qualcomm did not offer a photograph but did offer a diagram on a slide of its integration functions across 10 categories: Snapdragon processing, display processing, safety manager, secure processing, audio digital signal processing, video processing, embedded vision accelerator, spectra image signal processor, an Adreno GPU and a Kryo CPU.
Qualcomm Automotive General Manager Nakul Duggal said Flex has already been designed into multiple car platforms at OEMs. He said Qualcomm would share more about Flex at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.
During a presentation and Q&A with financial analysts, Amon, Duggal and Chief Financial Officer Akash Palkhiwala disclosed that each car using a variety of Qualcomm chips in coming years will bring revenues of $200 to $3,000, going from the least expensive to most expensive vehicles. License agreements for the chips inside each vehicle will be $5 per vehicle. Future vehicles will be software-defined, meaning carmakers will derive revenues from upgrades and apps over the lifetime of the vehicle equal up to the initial purchase price of a car.
In addition to a centralized Flex controller in a vehicle, Qualcomm expects to sell domain controllers and from four to 10 zonal controllers in a vehicle. Qualcomm will also sell its traditional RF chips for cellular connectivity, moving from 4G to 5G.
Amon said there will be an “incredible value add” market to sell chips and software to infrastructure providers in C-V2X scenario, including with roadside units and to motorcycle and bicycle OEMs.
Asked about the impact of possible US or foreign trade restrictions on sales to Chinese carmakers and suppliers, Amon said, “there’s been a strong wn-win partnership between the US and China enterprises and it will always be a force of stability, but we will see what the future holds.”
Several video presentations from CEOs of international carmakers were part of the two-hour presentation, including by Great Wall Motor of China.