Daikin Looking to Implement Custom Chips for Improved Performance

Daikin Industries, a Japanese air conditioner manufacturer, is turning to bespoke semiconductors to save energy, as companies increasingly look to bespoke chip designs to improve performance. Companies using legacy chips are also looking to introduce custom silicon as tech heavyweights such as Apple and Amazon invest heavily in custom cutting-edge chips.

Daikin, based in Osaka, expects to produce 10 million home air conditioners this fiscal year and has announced a collaboration with a Japanese design firm to customise logic chips for inverters used in its air conditioners. To save energy, inverters change the speed of an air conditioner's motor. They are common in Japan and the European Union, but not so much in the United States.

The custom chips, to be made by Taiwan's TSMC, cost more than off-the-shelf alternatives but offer better energy efficiency and allow a reduction in the use of other components, according to a Daikin executive.

"To bring out the full performance of an air conditioner's compressor and motor, we need to improve chip performance or we will hit a limit," Yuji Yoneda, general manger of Daikin's technology and innovation centre, said in an interview.

Daikin intends to use the chips in high-end air conditioners beginning in 2025, with a fifth of units using them by the end of the decade. The company, which created Japan's first packaged air conditioner in 1951, is also developing customised power modules to help manage the air conditioner's electricity supply.

Daikin has been hiring engineers from the chip industry to work on customisation while contending with competition from domestic semiconductor investment.

Daikin anticipates that a greater emphasis on energy efficiency will benefit the company. According to the International Energy Agency, the global number of air conditioners is expected to more than triple to 5.6 billion units by 2050.