“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 at the end,” says Kiyoul Yang, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University who focuses on photonic hardware. Many companies today use a handle system based on rotating mirrors, says Yang, which requires the manufacture of discrete and expensive components. “If everything can be integrated on a chip in a small format, then everything can be produced at low cost,” he says.
Again, Mobileye is not the only company that bets on FMCW, or chips dealing more broadly. But it has a distinct advantage that Intel already has a silicon photonics factory up and running in New Mexico. “Being able to build an FMCW deal requires know-how, but also if you don’t have the special factories to create the deal on a chip, it becomes very expensive. It has become difficult to manage, ”says Shashua. He expects the cost of each SoC deal to be in the order of hundreds of dollars each, much cheaper than the systems they cost today.
Even if Mobileye’s production roadmap remains stable, an uncertain regulatory outlook may delay its schedule. Still, it is making short-term progress as well, announcing at CES today that it would expand its autonomous vehicle tests to Detroit, Paris, Tokyo and Shanghai in 2020. (The locations are strategic; each is close to an automaker. provided by Mobileye and used millions of cars with Mobileye on board to crowdsource a map of nearly 1 billion kilometers of roads in the world to date, processing 8 million kilometers every day. For all the attention that Tesla receives, Mobileye is by far the leader in market share in the autonomous driving space.
That reputation, and Intel’s deep pockets, will help you against smaller competitors in the SoC race deal. “I firmly believe that in the automotive industry, reliability is a big differentiator,” says Mike Ramsey, automotive analyst at Gartner. “Can I trust that this supplier will deliver on time and with quality? And Intel has the very important feature of being a throat too big to choke if something goes wrong. Do not underestimate the value of this. “
Mobileye represents a small percentage of Intel’s overall revenue. But together with the customer’s computing group – that is, the chips that go to the PC and adjacent products – it is the only segment that grew in the company’s last quarter. It is exactly the kind of new territory that Intel needs to aggressively demarcate to avoid another smartphone-style mistake.
“If you look at the long term, a company like Intel needs to look for new growth areas. It is not easy to find one. You want to look for a new market with hundreds of billions of dollars, ”says Shashua, as well as one that builds on Intel’s strengths. “These domains are rare. We are in that domain. “
XPU marks the point
Mobileye’s SoC deal is the clearest example of what Intel calls the “XPU” strategy – that is, looking beyond the CPU to computing in all its various forms. The company launched its first discreet graphics card last fall, has a dominant position in data center processors and, in 2019, acquired chip maker AI Habana Labs, which a few weeks ago won deals from Amazon Web Services to use its accelerators to train deep learning models.
“At bottom, we are a computing 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 look like a computer, not just the server or the PC, but the car, the house, the factory, the hospital. All of these things need computing and intelligence. “
This expansion comes at a time when Intel faces more challenges than ever in its traditional business lines. Manufacturing delays kept him stuck in a 10-nanometer process to make his chips, while competitors switched to smaller forms. The company’s engineering director, Murthy Renduchintala, left last summer. And the Third Point hedge fund issued a scorching public letter in late December, calling Intel to “hire a reputable investment advisor to evaluate strategic alternatives, including whether Intel should remain a manufacturer of integrated devices and the potential divestment of certain failed acquisitions “.