Yesterday, the well-known Chinese chip design company Shanghai Fuhan Microelectronics Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Fuhan Micro) held a media conference and officially released its first car-grade front-mounted ISP chip FH8310. At the meeting, they also jointly announced with BYD that FH8310 has achieved mass production in its Tang second-generation new energy vehicles.
Founded in 2004, Fuhanwei has been known as a local video surveillance camera chip leader for the past few years. The launch of this product is an important step for them in the field of automotive electronics. It also indicates that Fuhan Microelectronics has broken the technical barriers of European, Japanese, and Korean manufacturers in the automotive front-mounted camera market, and is the first among domestic domestic semiconductor design companies to enter the vehicle front-mounted market.
China's first megapixel ISP chip
Feng Xiaoguang, director of the product planning department of Fuhan Micro, told reporters that FH8310 is the first car-grade front-loaded chip launched by Fuhan, and it is also the first car-grade image processing ISP chip with a megapixel or more for a domestic domestic semiconductor company. And in some ways this product has advantages that other rivals do not have.
It is understood that this chip is a 7.0 * 7.0 * 0.8mm package, which supports a maximum of 2 million pixels Bayer or RGB-IR CMOS image sensors; it supports a 10-bit parallel interface in input and CVBS and BT656 in output. And BT656 like interface; functional aspects also support 3DNR, AE, AWB, LSC and STE. Relying on this high-performance chip, Fuhanwei will be able to empower many aspects of automotive applications in the future.
For a car camera, the image effect in low light is very important, especially at night, how to better display is a problem that all developers need to consider. FH8310's unique support for time domain + spatial noise reduction 3DNR function can perfectly solve this problem. The so-called 3DNR, which is a three-dimensional digital noise reduction technology, is used to reduce the noise interference of weak signal images. By comparing adjacent frames of images, non-overlapping information (that is, noise) is automatically filtered out, thereby showing a relatively pure Delicate picture.
The actual measurement shows that vehicles equipped with FH8310 3DNR technology can provide high-quality image effects in low-light, slow-moving applications such as in-vehicle monitoring and reversing.
3DNR noise reduction effect display
Noise reduction technology alone can obviously not meet the complex and harsh use environment requirements of automobiles. Fullhan Micro has explored new solutions to support automotive camera work in hardware and algorithms.
As we all know, cameras usually have two working modes, day and night. In day mode, vivid color images are generated by imaging visible light on the RGB Bayer pattern sensor. In night mode, the infrared light fills the black and white infrared image under extremely low light. The traditional camera uses magnetically attracted mechanical IR-Cut devices to change the day and night image mode, that is, the device in the figure below uses a mechanical infrared switch to switch modes. However, mechanical IR-Cut has low reliability and high repair rate in the high-speed motion scene of the vehicle environment.
Fuhan IR-CUT Free V2.0 Technology
To solve this problem, image sensor manufacturers have developed RGB-IR image sensors to achieve simultaneous imaging of visible and infrared images. However, due to the mutual interference of visible light and infrared light, the color deviation of the image output by the traditional RGB-IR sensor will occur. To this end, Fuhan Microelectronics has introduced a unique RGB-IR image processing algorithm that can well support the RGB-IR 4×4 pattern, avoiding the problem of color deviation common in RGB-IR images, and reaching the traditional Bayer scene during day Pattern similar image color effect, to achieve better night vision effect in night scenes.
In addition, FH8310 also has a fisheye correction function. In application scenarios that require large and wide angles, such as back-up images and in-vehicle monitoring, the distorted images captured by the fisheye camera can be well corrected to normal images, improving the user experience. This chip also has a built-in reverse line display, which can be superimposed on the output image to facilitate system integration.
Fuhan Micro said that this chip also has rich link interfaces, which can support a variety of image transmission links such as CVBS, digital high-definition, and analog high-definition to support different application scenarios such as front view, surround view, and in-car cameras. The functional requirements of automobiles in the new era.
Rich link interface for rich car ISP
From monitoring to cars, Fuhanwei's new journey
Starting with H.264 encoder IP and DVR chips, to analog high-definition camera ISP chips, and then to chips for network cameras, Fuhanwei has gone through the development process from startups to listed companies in the past 14 years. Shipments exceeded 200 million units, and performance also increased significantly. Along the way, the company has also created two traditional product lines of security monitoring and intelligent hardware, especially in the field of intelligent security monitoring, Fuhanwei is among the first echelon of domestic semiconductor design companies. But they are not satisfied with this, they are engaged in the automotive electronics market, seeking new opportunities.
Fuhanwei's chip shipments
It is understood that, in the past few years, Fuhanwei cooperated with customers to realize the implementation of various after-installed products in the automotive field, including reversing cameras, streaming media rear-view cameras, and driving recorders. The front-loading products launched this time have further expanded the company's product line, consolidated the company's influence in this market, and embarked on a new journey.
As many analysts have said, due to the rise of autonomously assisted driving ADAS, artificial intelligence AI, and new energy vehicles, as an important sensor entry point for automobiles-vehicle cameras, they have also entered a period of rapid growth in recent years. According to HIS estimates, global vehicle camera shipments will grow from 28 million in 2014 to 83 million in 2020, a compound growth rate of 20%. Based on this estimate, the global automotive camera market will grow from RMB 6.2 billion in 2015 to RMB 13.3 billion in 2020, with a CAGR of 16%. Especially the high-reliability front-mounted camera market is the future trend. Fuhanwei is aiming at this circuit.
Global car camera market size
Fuhan Micro said that due to the past technology and experience accumulated in security chips, as well as strong technical strength and local service advantages, they have sufficient capital to enter the automotive-grade ISP chip market. Looking into the future, Fuhanwei hopes to become a high-end automotive ISP chip supplier that can compete with foreign manufacturers, and get rid of everyone's previous views on the weight and quality of Chinese chip manufacturers. They also revealed that the company has now begun investing in the development of AI-related products and is fully prepared for future smart car chips.