If you own or desire a Tesla, then you know these cars have autopilot and are getting closer and closer to fully autonomous driving. To support that latest feature, a new hardware update is pending. The new chips will be significant, massive, and classified as HPC chips.

Tesla will only be able to recover 25 chips per 12-inch wafer from its HW 4.0 design, which does not include yield corrections. The new chip designed in collaboration with Broadcom would be fabbed at 7nm. So that means these chips are bulky and even monolothic in size (which is prone to affect yields bigtime if you ask me). To paint a more clear picture, current HW3 3.0 chips are 20x13mm and can fit 217 on one 14nm wafer. So on 7nm HW3.0 would fit 434 chips compared top the 25 for HW 4.0. The new HPC chips would steer Tesla into autonomous driving. Due to the size of these chips, we also have some doubts about power consumption. Current HW3.0 takes roughly 200 Watts of power while driving. 

Broadcom and TSMC would have targeted the first production by the end of this year. Two thousand wafers, which are suitable for 50,000 chips. Then it would be scaled up in next year with mass production in late 2021.

Tesla HW 4.0 Chips baked with TSMC at 7nm have a Monolithic design