New-Tech Europe | May 2017

the start of a new era. What would be important going forward was not the same as what had been important in the past. Qualcomm, NXP, Intel, Mobileye, NVIDIA It is early but there is jockeying for position. Qualcomm is acquiring NXP, which was the market leader in automotive semiconductors and is itself fresh from digesting Freescale. On paper, that makes Qualcomm the market leader, but only in old-style automotive. Of course they have more experience with communication interfaces, especially 5G, than pretty much anyone. Intel is acquiring Mobileye for $15B. They are a manufacturing powerhouse at the leading edge, they have cellular modem technology, and now they will have the current leader in vision processing for automotive. Intel publicly admits that it "missed mobile" and it is clear that it doesn't want to make the same mistake in

automotive. Another leader is NVIDIA with their DRIVE platform. When it was clear that they were not going to be among the winners in mobile— Qualcomm and Mediatek had all the prizes—NVIDIA redirected all those resources to automotive. Of course, they already have a lot of experience with deep learning since their GPUs power a lot of the training phase. Being the early leader isn't always decisive, it's the second mouse that gets the cheese, but it is hard to enter a market once the players have been established. We seem to be at that phase right now and it may already be too late for a new semiconductor player to enter the market with any chance of success against Intel/ Mobileye, Qualcomm/NXP/Freescale, NVIDIA, Renasas, and others who are already in the race. Linley Autonomous Hardware Conference To me, the story of Linley Autonomous Hardware Conference was not some

had no experience with them. However, it wasn't just the case of taking existing vision algorithms and characterizing them for automotive reliability requirements. Another transformation was under way that added a new ingredient to the mix: vision processing, such as recognizing street signs or pedestrians, moved from algorithmic approaches to deep learning approaches in the space of a few years. If you have read the book Blue Ocean Strategy, this was a blue ocean that created itself. In some sense, there are no market leaders. The historic market leaders in automotive semiconductors have the relationships with the OEMs and Tier- 1s. The foundries and IDMs have the advanced processes. Various small companies have bits and pieces of the sensor fusion and vision processing. Another wrinkle was that ISO 26262 appeared in 2011 and gradually worked its way into everyone's consciousness. But there were no incumbents to be displaced, it was

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