BYD’s ‘God’s Eye’ Under the Lid

BYD “stands out from its global peers with its investment into semiconductors,” Yole Group believes.

YANGWANG U9 (source: BYD)

The rise of the Chinese automotive industry on the Electric Vehicle (EV) market is an oft-told story. China has staged a tour de force on the global EV market through substantial commitments and investments in production of EVs and batteries.

The key to BYD’s launch of “Intelligent Driving for All” initiative — designed to make ADAS standard in all its vehicles from low-end to high-end models — was the creation of an expansive domestic ecosystem in China, encompassing semiconductors, sensors, software and subsystems.

Describing BYD’s “God’s Eye” driving system as full self-driving technology is probably misleading, despite the hyperbolic marketing name.

But the point of BYD’s announcement is that it “has set a target to integrate its low-cost solution into its entire fleet as standard without charging customers extra,” Yole Group analysts observed. “This means it will offer at least L2+ autonomous driving functionality in all its cars.”

The announcement also illustrates the ascent of BYD.

Traditionally an OEM focused on volume production to take market share and enter foreign markets, BYD is now claiming brand leadership with its scalable ADAS technology stack.

“Compared to Xpeng, Li Auto, Nio and Huawei, all with their own intelligent driving systems, BYD was somewhat behind on the technology side,” observed Tu Le, founder at Sino Auto Insights. “It became very apparent that BYD had to work [on its own intelligent driving system], by partnering with someone, or some ones.” BYD did not disclose whose technology the company used in God’s Eye systems. But Le pointed out that BYD has been busy announcing partnership deals with Chinese companies such as DJI and Momenta.

Under the hood

At its announcement, BYD explained that it designed three God’s Eye levels for premium to budget vehicle models.

I asked Yole Group to help dig deeper and break down the underlying technologies used by BYD.

Three levels of the God’s Eye system designated as A, B and C use varying computing platforms (of 600, 300 and 100 TOPS). Each level also features varying sensor types. For example, the budget system, C, uses only cameras.

Yole summed up:

God’s Eye A – powered by a 600 trillion operations per second (TOPS) computing platform, will provide triple-LiDAR-based driving for BYD’s premium Yangwang models.

God’s Eye B–at 300 TOPS—will support LiDAR-based driving in the Denza, FangChengBao and some BYD models.

God’s Eye C, with a 100 TOPS computing platform, will deliver triple-camera-based features without LiDAR for BYD-branded budget vehicles.

Sensors

The teardown of BYD God’s Eye system starts with sensors.

A table below, created by Yole, shows different sensors developed by different companies. Note that “most BYD suppliers are Chinese” according to Yole.

From cameras to radars and lidars in particular, it shows how BYD has taken advantage of a deep bench of domestic technology suppliers — from RoboSense and Hesai to Huawei and Horizon Robotics.

Source: Yole Group

Most of BYD suppliers are Chinese for sensors or computing platforms.

More details on sensors (non-exhaustive list):

• Camera: Veoneer (China), (Possibly BYD themselves)

• Radar: Shenzhen Cheng-Tech Co., Ltd., FinDreams Tech Co., Ltd. (owned by BYD), Veoneer (China)

• LiDAR: RoboSense/Hesai/Huawei

• Ultrasonic: FinDreams Tech Co., Ltd. (owned by BYD)

• Computing platform: Nvidia/Horizon Robotics

  Source: Yole Group

BYD computer platform

For its computer platform, BYD is using many solutions and processors for ADAS, according to Yole. They include AMD Xilinx FPGA, Horizon Robotics and Nvidia.

Source: Yole Group

While BYD is using multiple solutions/teams for various ADAS levels, Yole has identified them in two groups. For mid and high-end vehicles, BYD uses solutions based on joint work with Momenta. For the budget model, it relies on BYD’s in-house ADAS.

Yole also pointed out that BYD has a strong history in electronics manufacturing services. Further, BYD already developed in-house MCUs that are used in its vehicles.

Asked if those are RISC-V based MCUs, Yu Yang, principal analyst, Automotive Semiconductors at Yole Group, said, “RISC-V based MCUs are popular in China, but still at early stages. BYD has multiple in-house MCUs (both 8 and 32-byte), based on Arm cores, used for mainly body domain, not critical functions.”

As for domain controllers inside vehicles, BYD is still using MCUs from leading players, he said, but no details are available on suppliers yet.

In-house SoC development

Over the last several years, every major OEM in the world, including China’s Xpeng and Nio, talked about their desire to build their own SoCs, presumably to control their destiny.

Even though it is now using SoCs from leading chip vendors, mainly Nvidia and Horizon Robotics, BYD is expected to turn the corner sooner than others. This is largely because BYD, a designer of its own MCUs, already has experience with semiconductors. When, not if, BYD designs and deploys its own ADAS SoCs for God’s Eye level C, the Chinese auto company should already be its own high-volume customer.

Lei Xing, co-host of China EVs & More podcast, agreed. In discussions on BYD with Sino Auto Insights’ Le, he said, “The joke on the street is that, besides tires and window glass, BYD does everything on its own. That is not yet true, because they do source chips and lidars. But guess what? Those are the exact same products they're developing in-house right now —the domain controllers, the lidars, the chips—like what Nio and Xpeng are doing.”

Vertical integration

BYD is developing a winning recipe for lower cost, feature-rich vehicles via vertical integration.

Yole Group summed up:

To optimize costs, BYD is targeting a high level of vertical integration, bringing much of the technology in-house, including lidar and system-on-chip (SoC) development. Like nearly all Chinese OEMs, BYD stands out from its global peers with its investment into semiconductors.