On December 5, 2025, Zhuang Ji, Senior Marketing Director of Innochip Micro, pointed out at the 2nd Zero Run Intelligent Automotive Technology Forum and Forward looking Technology Exhibition that with the rapid popularization of intelligent configuration in automobiles, highly integrated and multi in one intelligent drive chips are becoming the core path to improve vehicle node efficiency and reduce system costs. Based on a cumulative shipment of over 400 million units, its products cover three major directions: lighting, motor control, and intelligent sensing. Through the technology path of "replacing multiple chips with a single chip", it provides a full scenario solution for mainstream global automotive companies.

Zhuang Ji shared that Innochip Micro focuses on the automotive front-end market and is committed to providing highly integrated edge intelligent node solutions for intelligent vehicle bodies. The core product line of Innochip Micro covers body lighting, motor drivers, and sensors, with a market share of over 60% in the interior LED driver market in the Asia Pacific region. The company integrates traditional multi chip solutions into a single chip through technological innovation, helping customers achieve cost reduction and miniaturization. At present, we have served numerous customers including Audi, BMW, Huawei, and mainstream domestic car companies, and provided dual supply chain support for domestic and overseas markets to flexibly meet global market demands.

Innochip Micro: A New Trend in Intelligent Automotive Driving

Zhuang Ji | Senior Marketing Director of Innochip Micro

The following is a summary of the speech content:

Highly integrated chips have become the key to reducing costs and increasing efficiency in vehicle body nodes

Highly integrated intelligent chips are becoming a key path for vehicle electronic nodes to achieve cost reduction and efficiency improvement. With the rapid evolution of automotive electronic and electrical architecture from distributed to domain control and even centralized, the number of nodes such as sensors, actuators, and lighting units in the car has significantly increased, which has put forward more stringent requirements for the integration, power consumption, and overall cost of core chips. Through innovative chip design, Innochip Micro highly integrates multiple functions such as driver, communication, power management, and functional safety diagnosis into a single chip, successfully replacing the traditional complex solution consisting of "MCU+multiple peripheral discrete chips" in various scenarios such as RGB ambient lights, exterior lamp head taillight drivers, intelligent surface touch, and micro motor drivers. Taking the typical application of the touch module for car roof lights/reading lights as an example, the traditional implementation method requires an external general-purpose MCU, an LDO power chip, a LIN bus transceiver, and necessary driving circuits. However, the chip provided by Innochip Micro can complete all functions of touch detection, logic control, LIN communication, power management, and LED driving with a single chip, which not only significantly reduces the PCB board area, but also directly reduces the overall BOM cost of the system. Similar integration advantages are also reflected in numerous vehicle body nodes such as door control modules and smart seat panels that are highly sensitive to space and cost.

In addition, in the field of motor control, its iND87422 series chip further integrates all the power supply, communication, signal sampling, motor drive, and control calculation required for micro motor applications, becoming a highly optimized specialized standard product. The support for this highly integrated product strategy is the deep layout of Innochip Micro at the supply chain level. The company has successfully introduced and mass-produced a 90 nanometer BCD+eFlash characteristic process platform based on 12 inch wafers. This advanced manufacturing process not only improves the performance and reliability of chips, but also brings considerable cost-effectiveness advantages, building a stable production capacity guarantee. By relying on a mature delivery system in the national production supply chain, Innochip Micro is able to efficiently respond to global market demand, while meeting orders from international mainstream automotive companies, and continuously providing highly competitive high integration chip solutions for domestic customers.

The interior lighting driver chip is rapidly upgrading towards high-capacity storage, high-precision color control, and complex dynamic effects. As the ambient lighting in the car gradually evolves from a single static color decoration to a dynamic light language system that can interact with users, synchronize with music rhythm, and even link with advanced driving assistance systems, it puts unprecedented high demands on the storage space, communication bandwidth, and color consistency of the driver chip. In 2024, Innochip Microelectronics launched the world's first ambient light driver chips iND83229B and iND83213BCS01 equipped with 128KB high-capacity Flash, bringing a breakthrough solution to the industry. This large storage space enables the chip to support secure over the air technology upgrades, A/B partition backups, and program rollback mechanisms, solving the bottleneck of traditional 32KB Flash capacity that cannot accommodate complex animation effects and security verification codes.

In terms of ensuring color accuracy, the chip integrates patented PN junction voltage detection technology, which can directly monitor the junction temperature of LED beads in real time through their physical characteristics, thereby achieving accurate temperature compensation within ± 2 ° C. Its effect is far superior to traditional solutions that rely on external temperature sensors and calculate through complex thermal resistance models, which often have errors exceeding 10 ° C and are prone to visible color differences in different areas of the car's light strips. In terms of achieving stunning dynamic effects, the iND83213A chip based on LIN bus communication can independently drive up to 40 RGB LED beads with innovative time-division multiplexing technology. This solution has been successfully mass-produced on models such as the WENJIE M9, achieving smooth dynamic lighting such as flowing water and sweeping; Compared to traditional solutions that require 5 chips, this highly integrated single-chip design can save customers a significant amount of BOM costs.

In response to the demand for extreme brightness and daytime visibility, Innochip Micro has also launched the iND23224 series driver chip that supports 0.5W high-power RGB LED chips. Its output current of up to 200mA per channel ensures vivid visual effects even in strong light environments. In addition, for top-level configuration models that use high-speed CAN bus or 10M Ethernet for communication, its iND83220 chip based solution can achieve up to 2Mbps communication speed, with a single chip driving up to 54 RGB light beads, meeting the ultimate dynamic effects and fastest OTA upgrade requirements, demonstrating its comprehensive technical layout in the high-end interior lighting field.

Touch and motor driver chips expand intelligent surfaces and execution control scenarios

Touch and motor drive chips are extending intelligent experiences to a wider range of automotive surfaces and precision execution control scenarios. In the field of touch interaction, Innochip's single-chip solutions have expanded from reading lights to diverse intelligent surfaces such as roof control panels, smart door handles, seat adjustment panels, and even touch car logos. Taking the door touch module as an example, the iND87501T chip can realize touch wake-up in a low power consumption standby mode of only 60 microamps. It has effectively improved the signal-to-noise ratio by virtue of its patented synchronous protection ring technology, enabling it to accurately distinguish wet hand operation from environmental interference such as water flow and water stains. It has successfully passed rigorous tests such as rainstorm scouring and high-pressure water gun, ensuring reliable triggering in various complex environments.

This chip has successfully replaced the original discrete component solution in multiple car models, achieving all functions of touch detection, MCU logic control, LDO power management, and LIN bus communication with a single chip, significantly reducing the complexity and cost of the system. In the field of motor control, for the quiet cabin environment of electric vehicles without engine noise masking, the iND87422 series chip from Innochip integrates advanced vector magnetic field directional control algorithms, gate drivers, LIN communication interfaces, and comprehensive diagnostic protection functions. It is applied to actuators that require precise movement such as air conditioning blade grilles and active intake grilles, and its operating noise can be controlled below 25 decibels, greatly improving the quietness and comfort of driving and riding. In the core actuators of thermal management systems such as electronic expansion valves, this chip supports full range real-time stall detection from low speed to high speed, and combines hardware diagnostic functions such as overcurrent, overvoltage, and overtemperature to ensure the safety and durability of the system. Currently, it has achieved large-scale production among Tier-1 thermal management suppliers, demonstrating strong competitiveness in the field of precision motor drives.

The exterior lighting effect is developing towards pixelation and animation, such as through type taillights, grille interactive lights, etc., which require high channel count linear drive chip support. The iND83010 series from Innochip Micro integrates a 24 channel current source and CAN PHY, with a single chip capable of driving 1536 OLED pixels, and has passed ASIL-B functional safety certification. It has been mass-produced on numerous car models. To reduce costs, the company has launched a domestically produced supply chain version iND23024 to help customers reduce costs and increase efficiency.

For intelligent interactive lights (ISD), the ELINS bus scheme based on iND83220 can achieve cross board control through UART over CAN communication without the need for external MCU protocol conversion. For example, in the 348 pixel interactive light project, only 3 iND83220 chips are needed to achieve time-sharing driving, avoiding the cost and layout complexity of additional PHY chips required by traditional SPI schemes.

Future prospects: Chip integration and cross domain fusion become mainstream

With the further increase of in car nodes, the integration and cross domain control capabilities of chips will become the focus of differentiated competition. Indixin Micro plans to deeply integrate sensing, driving, and communication functions, such as simultaneously supporting touch detection, RGB driving, and motor control in a single chip, reducing the number of ECUs. In addition, the company is developing a 10Base-T1S Ethernet chip to support higher rates of OTA and data synchronization. Faced with cost and supply chain security challenges, enterprises need to continuously optimize the efficiency of domestic production lines while maintaining compatibility with overseas technical standards to support the diverse needs of global customers.