People who pay attention to the field of electric vehicles should frequently see the name "VinFast" in recent years. From the establishment of the factory in the United States to the planned listing in the United States, VinFast has used big moves to brush up its sense of existence.

In fact, VinFast has a grand plan for the future, and is actively joining forces with supply chain companies towards this plan.

01

"ambitious" VinFast

Founded in 2017, VinFast is a young start-up in Vietnam. With the backing of Pham Nhat Vuong, the richest man in Vietnam, and his Vingroup, whose main business is real estate, VinFast's development can be described as "speed of light":

In 2018, VinFast acquired GM's car production line in Vietnam; at the end of the same year, VinFast became the first national car brand with mass production capacity in Vietnam's history; in 2020, VinFast squeezed into the top five car sales in Vietnam; Delivered its first batch of electric vehicles to domestic users in Vietnam; in March this year, VinFast announced that it would invest US$2 billion in a new car factory in the United States; on April 7 this year, VinFast announced that it had submitted a listing application to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Facing the future, VinFast has a detailed plan.

In early 2022, at a press conference held in Las Vegas, the United States, VinFast Global CEO Le Thi Thu Thuy announced that VinFast will completely abandon fuel vehicles and become a pure electric vehicle professional enterprise. In terms of production and sales, VinFast aims to produce and sell about 1 million electric vehicles within five to six years. And VinFast's output in 2021 is about 35,000 vehicles - in comparison,VinFast's ambition cannot be said to be small.

02

Continuously expand the "circle of friends" in the semiconductor field

VinFast hopes to become one of the major players in the global electric vehicle market, but Vietnam's automobile industry is weak, the domestic automobile supply chain is fragile and incomplete, and many parts still need to be imported from abroad, and this status quo is hard to change in a short time. Therefore, VinFast attaches great importance to cooperation with the supply chain.

Among them, in the field of semiconductors, VinFast has recently expanded its cooperation with Infineon. It is reported that the two parties will establish a joint application competence center focusing on electric vehicles in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, to help VinFast develop solutions for future smart vehicles.

According to reports, the two parties will jointly participate in the early development stage of VinFast's next-generation smart mobility solutions and discuss how to meet future semiconductor demand to achieve supply chain stability. At the same time, based on its knowledge of the system and its broad product and technology portfolio, Infineon will provide technical support and guidance for semiconductor selection, including conventional technologies and technologies based on Wide Band Gap (WBG) semiconductor materials such as Silicon Carbide (SiC).

Meanwhile, VICC will have a laboratory equipped with testing and measuring equipment to provide timely product verification. The center is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2023.

In September, VinFast also expanded cooperation with Renesas Electronics. Among them, Renesas Electronics will provide VinFast with a series of products such as microcontrollers and system chips for automobiles, and provide technical support for VinFast to develop in-vehicle applications and various services. According to the agreement, the two parties will also deepen technical cooperation in the field of drive systems in the future.

03

The indissoluble bond between car companies and third-generation semiconductor companies

The third-generation semiconductor materials represented by SiC have the characteristics of high frequency, high efficiency and energy saving, and have obvious application advantages in the field of electric vehicles. At present, car companies are "deeply bound" with SiC companies due to factors such as locking in production capacity in advance and jointly developing new technologies.

In addition to expanding cooperation with the above-mentioned VinFast, Infineon’s electric vehicle inverter SiC modules, which will be launched in June 2021, will be applied to Hyundai Motor’s next-generation 800V electric vehicles;

Wolfspeed and GM signed a strategic supplier agreement in October 2021 to develop and deliver SiC power devices for GM's electric vehicles, and GM will exclusively use Wolfspeed's products in Ultium Drive propulsion units for its next-generation electric vehicles;

Vitesco signed an agreement with Ford Motor in January 2022 to supply 800V SiC inverters from 2025, a deal worth 1 billion euros;

Hitachi announced in September 2022 that its subsidiary Hitachi Astemo has received an order for Honda's SiC electric drive system (e-Axle), which is expected to be available in 2026.

Under the high demand, industry chain companies have also given expansion plans. For example, Roma Semiconductor plans to expand production by 6 times from 2019 to 2025, that is, from an annual output value of about 50,000 pieces to 300,000-400,000 pieces; ON Semiconductor announced that it will spend $450 million to expand its Czech plant, expanding its silicon carbide production capacity by 16 times; WolfSpeed announced that it will build the largest silicon carbide material factory, increasing its silicon carbide production capacity in North Carolina, the United States, by more than 10 times.

Domestically, the annual production capacity of silicon carbide production line currently designed by Time Electric can meet the demand of 100,000-120,000 new energy vehicles. There are further investment plans in the future, and the corresponding demand assessment is tentatively about 3 million vehicles. Laughing technology is expected to achieve a supply capacity of 5,000 tablets/month by the end of this year, 10,000 tablets/month in April next year, and 200,000 tablets in the whole year next year.

It is worth noting that although the supply chain and car companies have given great enthusiasm to silicon carbide, silicon carbide is still in its infancy, and it will take some time to break through the technical bottleneck and output bottleneck-as can be seen from the supply time of silicon carbide companies in the previous article, the supply time mostly starts in 2025 and 2026.

However, as a definite growth field, silicon carbide is worth looking forward to in the future market size. The complementary development between it and electric vehicles will also bring consumers a safer and faster transportation life.

Source: DRAMeXchange