Leading fabless IC design houses in Taiwan have been developing their business to non-consumer electronic applications in recent years, and automotive electronics have been one of the areas that they prioritize in their resource allocations.
With handset APs still in sluggish demand and new-spec networking chips not yet well adopted, the competition between Qualcomm and MediaTek is gradually shifting to the realm of automotive and computing chips - an area where Qualcomm has a leading edge, but MediaTek shows a clear determination to catch up, according to industry sources.
Automotive chip IDMs including STMicroelectronics, NXP, Infineon, and Texas Instruments have their respective most sought-after offerings, which have been in tight supply with prices staying high at China spot market channel distributors, according to supply chain sources.
Taiwan s major IC design houses have shown little interest in developing chip solutions for charging piles, due mainly to the relatively smaller market scale for the chip segment than for ICT applications, according to industry sources.