Tesla partners with Samsung on 5nm chip to enable fully autonomous driving: report

According to a report from South Korea, Tesla is collaborating with Samsung to develop a new 5nm chip meant to enable fully self-driving cars. Samsung is one of the few companies capable of manufacturing chips on a 5nm architecture and is already supplying Tesla with 14nm chips which the company uses for its Hardware 3.0 (HW3) computers.

5nm chips are some of the latest developments in semiconductor technology found only on the latest flagship devices such as the iPhone 12 and Samsung Galaxy S21. The chips will reportedly power Tesla’s next generation Hardware 4.0 (HW4) which will be achieve 4D Full Self-Driving (FSD) capability that the company is working on right now.

Elon Musk says his team are working on the next two generations of the full self-driving chip, and they are 2 years away from mass production. He expects them to be 3 times better than current chips being used in Tesla’s cars.

Previously, it was reported that Tesla planned to use 7nm chips developed by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., developed alongside Broadcom, for its next generation self-driving hardware. Samsung, however, chose to skip 7nm chips to focused on 5nm chip manufacturing technology instead. That decision seems to have paid off as Korean publication Asia-E reports, “According to related industries on the 25th, the Samsung Electronics Foundry Division is currently conducting research and development (R&D) on 5nm-class system semiconductors to be mounted on Tesla autonomous vehicles. The 5nm semiconductor applied with the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) process is a high-tech product that only a small number of companies such as Samsung Electronics and TSMC can produce worldwide.”