Sept. 06, 2018 –
The market for automotive electronics is booming, and it has set off a global scramble among established chipmakers and startups.
What's becoming clear, though, is that not everyone understands just how different automotive is from the mobile market. Mobile is still the highest-volume market for semiconductors, but the growth has flattened. In contrast, the value of the automotive electronics market is rising quickly, and more chipmakers are attempting to stake a claim.
"Everybody thinks automotive is the next big market," said Jim Feldhan, president of Semico Research. "If you're on the high end, such as Nvidia, Intel, AMD and others who do high-end computing, they're looking at autonomous driving and thinking, 'There are 120 million-plus cars manufactured per year. One day, they'll all have the equivalent of multiple servers through the autonomous driving system. That's a lot of compute power.'"