Ideal Auto to Set Up Chip R & D Office in Hong Kong, Developing Multiple Chips
TapTechNews October 9th news, according to LatePost Auto's report today, Ideal Auto plans to set up a chip R & D office in Hong Kong and is recruiting AI chip architects at the level of 18-19.
The report said that the office is positioned as an international technology exchange center and belongs to Ideal Chip Pre-research Department. Currently, the open positions roughly correspond to technical experts/senior experts in domestic top Internet companies (such as Ali P7/P8), and the team size is expected to be about 10 people.
A person close to Ideal said that the Ideal Chip Pre-research Department belongs to the System Operation Department and is mainly responsible for the software R & D work related to intelligent driving chips. The people required by the pre-research team are all elites.
TapTechNews noticed that Ideal Auto established a new company in 2022, whose business scope includes chip design, named Sichuan Ideal Intelligent Motion Technology Co., Ltd., which triggered speculation in the industry about Ideal Auto's self-developed chips.
LatePost Auto's report mentioned that Ideal is currently developing two kinds of chips simultaneously, namely an AI inference chip for intelligent driving scenarios and a SiC power chip for driving motor controllers. Among them, the Ideal intelligent driving AI inference chip adopts a similar architecture to Tesla's Hardware 5.0, with the number of transistors being about 40 billion, and has been sent to TSMC for tapeout. The Ideal intelligent driving vehicle-end inference chip is expected to have the tapeout result in the fourth quarter of this year and be mass-produced and installed in vehicles in 2026.
As the first profitable automaker among domestic new energy vehicle startups, Ideal Auto delivered 53,709 vehicles in September 2024, setting a new historical high for monthly deliveries, with a year-on-year increase of 48.9%. In the third quarter of 2024, Ideal Auto delivered 152,831 vehicles, with a year-on-year increase of 45.4%. As of September 30, 2024, Ideal Auto has delivered 341,812 vehicles in total in 2024, and the cumulative historical delivery volume is 975,176 vehicles.
