LG's Home Appliance AI Chip Tops 1 Million Units Last Year

Washing machines, dryers and air conditioners contain a chip that serves as the product’s “brain.” LG Electronics’ in-house AI chip for home appliances, the DQ-C series, is that chip. It handles AI control, voice recognition and user behavior analysis. According to The Electronic Times, shipments of the chip for home appliances topped 1 million units last year.

Two years earlier, shipments of the same chip stood at around 100,000 units, an increase of more than tenfold. The chips are designed by the System-on-Chip (SoC) Center within LG Electronics’ Seocho R&D Campus. The unit develops SoCs, semiconductors that integrate multiple functions on a single chip, and reports to the chief technology officer (CTO). It began in 1992 as the Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) Center at the Goldstar Central Research Institute. ASICs are chips designed for specific uses. The production model resembles Apple’s. The company designs chips tailored to its own appliances and outsources manufacturing to contract chipmakers, known as foundries. The same center designed the “Alpha 9” and “Alpha 11” processors, which are used in organic light-emitting diode (OLED) TVs.

As AI features spread across home appliances, custom AI chips have become a key factor in product competitiveness. This is where volume takes on meaning. The more chips shipped, the more reliably LG Electronics can gather large volumes of data from its many appliances, analyze it and apply it to the design of next-generation chips. The report describes this as a virtuous cycle that improves both chip and appliance performance. However, the report does not provide figures showing how much performance will improve.

Chip volume is expected to rise to several million units this year. The company aims to secure technological leadership by strengthening its design capabilities for semiconductors used in its major appliances and TVs. Its goal is to secure appliance features and security that differentiate it from competitors. The idea is that consumers will benefit from features and security that vary by product, but the report does not say which features will arrive, or when.

The next frontier is robotics. LG Electronics is developing robots as a new growth engine. Because processors that handle real-time data and perform AI computation will be critical, the report expects the company to likely develop semiconductors tailored to robots in-house. An industry insider said that as shipments of appliance chips grow, a structure builds competitiveness on data, and that developing robot chips as well would make LG Electronics’ ecosystem more complete. Robot chips remain at the stage of expectation, and the article reports only projections.