Tesla launched the Hardware 4 Autopilot computer earlier this year, but it's already working on the next-generation chips. The EV maker has been listed among the first companies to benefit from TSMC's most advanced 3 nm lithography process, called N3P.
Everyone who remembers the chip crunch that followed the pandemic knows how vital the chip industry is for car manufacturing. Every modern vehicle is a computer on wheels, with sometimes hundreds of chips controlling various sub-systems. When car production increased in 2021, the chip-hungry carmakers were forced to halt production because the tiny electronic devices were nowhere to be found.
Tesla faired substantially better thanks to its vertically integrated manufacturing. The EV maker designs its own chips instead of using off-the-shelf components. This allowed it to consolidate many functions and controllers into a single chip die, thus needing far fewer of them. Controlling the hardware also allowed Tesla to control the software, which meant it could quickly repurpose different chips to offer various functionalities based on what was available at a particular moment.
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