Homegrown MCU marks display chipmaker’s first step into automotive semiconductors LX Semicon's LX61101 automotive microcontroller, shown next to a fingertip for scale, has entered mass production for Hyundai Motor and Kia. (LX Semicon) LX Semicon, South Korea's largest fabless chipmaker, has begun mass-producing its first automotive microcontroller unit and started shipping it to Hyundai Motor and Kia, the company said Monday.The Daejeon-based firm is part of the LX group, which was spun off from LG in 2021, and is best known as a supplier of display driver chips.The chip, called the LX61101, handles an essential job inside the car: Controlling small motors that move things like windows, mirrors and aerodynamic flaps. One application the company highlighted is the auto-reverse function on power windows, which stops and reopens the window when it detects an obstruction.It is built on a 40-megahertz Arm Cortex-M3 core, a widely used low-power design suited to embedded control work rather than to the high-end computing behind driver assistance or infotainment.LX Semicon describes the LX61101 as the first domestically developed MCU adopted by Hyundai and Kia, with design, foundry and back-end assembly all handled by Korean firms. It has not named its foundry or packaging partners, the vehicle models involved, or the size of the contract.The chip will appear first in models produced in the second half of this year, with adoption widening over time.The program began in March 2023, when LX Semicon was picked as a new supplier in Hyundai and Kia's motor-specialized MCU competition and won the award the following month. The chip cleared the AEC-Q100 reliability standard and ISO 26262 functional safety requirements during development, the company said.Display driver ICs accounted for 87.6 percent of the company's sales in the first quarter of this year, and group revenue slipped to about 1.64 trillion won ($1.16 billion) in 2025 from 1.87 trillion won the year before as the display chip cycle weakened.Automotive MCUs, along with the thermal substrates it began producing in Siheung last year, are the two pillars of a diversification push meant to reduce that dependence. The Hyundai-Kia project is the first of those bets to reach a customer.Hyundai Motor Group, for its part, has pushed to bring more automotive chip sourcing in-house since the 2021 global MCU shortage, which exposed how heavily Korean carmakers relied on imports even as the country dominates memory and foundry manufacturing.