Rumor: Tesla’s HW 4.0 for autonomous driving is huge chip made at 7nm

Tesla would work with Broadcom on its HW 4.0 chip. Only 25 chips would fit on a TSMC 300mm wafer. It can be concluded from this that the chip is much larger and more powerful than current hardware. Production would start at the end of this year.

According to China Times, Tesla’s Hardware 4.0 for the FSD computer is made on TSMC’s 7nm process. The Chinese newspaper writes that only 25 chips can fit on a 300mm wafer. That would mean that the HW 4.0 chips are many times larger than the HW 3.0 chips; they have dimensions of 20x13mm and about 217 of them fit on a wafer. Moreover, those chips are still made at 14nm.

Due to the switch to the 7nm process and a much larger chip size, many more transistors fit on the chip, which makes the new hardware much more powerful. The new hardware should be able to make Tesla cars completely self-driving.

Broadcom and TSMC would like to make the first batches of the chip by the end of this year. Then 2000 wafers would be produced, good for 50,000 chips. This production will be scaled up in the course of next year. In the last quarter of 2021, the company could begin mass production of the chips.

Tesla started designing its own chips for its cars in 2016. The Hardware 3.0 chip came out in April last year and was produced by Samsung. Drivers with the Full Self-Driving Package can upgrade their HW2 + chip to the new one for free.