Hyundai Motor Co. is highly likely to suffer a further production delay for its all-electric crossover IONIQ 5 after South Korean industry sources said on Wednesday that Infineon Technologies recently scrapped two months' output of its flawed automotive chips.
The world’s top automotive chipmaker has found flaws in its IGBT chips produced between early April and early June of this year and has discarded all the automotive chips manufactured during the period.
The flaws occurred in the process of injecting aluminium-ion into batteries, instead of nitrogen. Aluminium-ion has replaced nitrogen in the advanced manufacturing process to power rechargeable batteries.
The automotive chips produced in early April were meant to be shipped to Hyundai Motor from the middle of this month.
Power modules equipped with IGBT chips are used to manufacture power electric (PE) systems and then PE modules. The IGBT-based PE modules are installed in the IONIQ 5, a mid-size crossover utility vehicle (CUV).
It takes three months to produce an IGBT chip and another month to piece them together to make a power module.
Chip supply disruptions will unlikely be resolved before mid-October and the wait time for IONIQ 5 buyers should be longer than one year.
The chip supply disruption will put the brake on Hyundai's plan to accelerate production in the second half of this year.
Hyundai is looking for alternative options to secure automotive chips from other semiconductor companies to prevent production disruptions to IONIQ 5.
But industry insiders said that the EV model cannot avoid the deepening supply shortages.
“We’re making efforts to meet the minimum demand,” said an Infineon official in South Korea. “The global chip shortage will get worse for a while.”
The IGBT lead time, or the time between the initiation and completion of the automotive chip production, was prolonged to 50 weeks, Chinese news outlet Digitimes reported on Wednesday, citing industry sources in China.
It provided no reason for the supply delay.
The IONIQ 5, unveiled last year, is the first car to sit on Hyundai Motor Group’s Electric-Global Modular Platform (E-CMP). Its E-CMP cars support fast charging with an 80% charge from empty possible in just 18 minutes, according to Hyundai.
Write to Il-Gyu Kim at
black0419@hankyung.comYeonhee Kim edited this article.from Hacker News https://ift.tt/BjY483c
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.