“The advantage that silicon photonics can bring is a small form factor solution, which can result in a compact size of the device in the car in the end,” says Kiyoul Yang, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University who focuses on the photonic hardware. Today, many companies use a lidar system based on rotating mirrors, according to Yang, which requires the manufacture of discrete and expensive components. “If everything can be integrated into a chip with a reduced form factor, then everything can be produced at a low cost,” he says.
Again, Mobileye isn’t the only company that uses FMCW or deals with chips more widely. But it has a clear advantage in that Intel already has a silicon photonics manufacturing plant installed in New Mexico. “Being able to build an FMCW lidar requires technical knowledge, but also if you don’t have the special manufacturers to create the lidar on a chip, it’s too expensive. It gets light, ”says Shashua. He expects the cost of each SoC to deal with hundreds of dollars each, orders of magnitude cheaper than what systems currently cost.
Even if Mobileye’s production roadmap remains stable, an uncertain regulatory outlook could slow its timeline. However, it is also moving in the short term, and announced today at CES that it will expand autonomous vehicle testing in Detroit, Paris, Tokyo and Shanghai in 2020. (Locations are strategic; each is close to a vehicle manufacturer that supplies Mobileye has used the millions of cars with Mobileye on board to supply a map of nearly 1 billion miles of roads in the world to date, processing 8 million miles every day.For all the attention Tesla pays, Mobileye it is by far the leading market share in the autonomous driving space.
This reputation, and Intel’s deep pockets, will help it against smaller competitors in the SoC lidar race. “I strongly believe that in the automotive industry, trust is a big differentiator,” says Mike Ramsey, a Gartner automotive analyst. “Can I trust this vendor to deliver on time, to deliver in quality? And Intel has the very important feature of being a very big throat to suffocate if something goes wrong. Don’t underestimate the value in that.”
Mobileye accounts for a small percentage of Intel’s overall revenue. But along with the group of customer computing, i.e. chips that go to PCs and adjacent products, is the only segment that grew in the company’s most recent quarter. It’s exactly the kind of new territory Intel has to aggressively delve into to avoid another smartphone-style flaw.
“If you look at the long term, a company like Intel must look for new growth domains. It is not easy to find one. You want to look for a new market that is the size of hundreds of billions of dollars, “says Shashua, as well as one that takes advantage of Intel’s strengths.” These domains are rare. We’re in that domain. “
XPU marks the point
Mobileye’s lidar SoC is the sharpest example of what Intel calls its “XPU” strategy, which is to look beyond the CPU to computing in all its forms. The company launched its first discrete graphics card last fall, holds a dominant position in data center processors, and in 2019 acquired AI chip maker Habana Labs, which a few weeks ago won Amazon Web Services business for use your accelerators to form deep learning models.
“At our heart we are a computer company,” says Gregory Bryant, who leads Intel’s customer computing group. “We see this world where more and more things need computing, more and more things that look like a computer, not just the server or the computer, but the car, the home, the factory and the hospital. All these things need computers and they need intelligence ”.
This expansion comes at a time when Intel faces more challenges than ever in its traditional business lines. Manufacturing delays have kept him trapped in a 10-nanometer process to make his chips, while competitors have switched to smaller shapes. The company’s chief engineer, Murthy Renduchintala, left last summer. And Third Point hedge fund issued a fiery public letter in late December asking Intel to “retain a reputable investment advisor to evaluate strategic alternatives, including whether Intel should continue to be an integrated device manufacturer and the potential divestment of certain failed acquisitions ”.