Hyundai Mobis said it has started developing thirteen kinds of automotive system chips with Korean designers, and that target vehicle models have already been fixed for nine of them.
The work has been pulled from a pool of nineteen joint projects identified over the past year through Auto Semicon Korea, a consortium the parts supplier launched in 2025.
A bigger room than last year
The second forum on Wednesday drew 53 companies and institutions, up from 27. Participants now span Samsung Electronics and SK Keyfoundry as foundries, plus design houses and firms working on software, packaging, testing and functional safety.
Hyundai Mobis president Lee Gyu-suk framed the effort as sharing risk. No single company, he said, should have to carry the entry cost of automotive-grade silicon alone.
The industry backdrop is a dependency problem. Korea imports roughly 95 percent of its automotive chips, a gap exposed when the 2021 shortage idled assembly lines and again when trade friction between China and the Netherlands disrupted supply.
The hard part comes later
Automotive parts must survive temperature swings, vibration and a decade of use, and carry qualification paperwork that stretches qualification timelines far beyond consumer silicon. Nine of the thirteen chips have a nominated model, but the first volume fitting in Hyundai and Kia vehicles is not expected before 2029.
Seoul has put about KRW300B into twelve research projects intended to lift the domestic sourcing share toward 10 percent by 2030. A separate memorandum covers a research fab for silicon carbide power devices. Both depend on whether the chips hold up once they are qualified.
