The autonomous vehicle chip market is forecast to reach $29 Billion by 2030. Chips for autonomous vehicles fall into four categories: traditional automotive microcontrollers (emission control, antilock brakes); wireless chips that connect the cars to the Internet; vision sensors that “see” the road; processor chips that use AI and include the autonomous vehicle’s “brain.”
Some leading chip makers for autonomous cars include Mobileye (Intel), NVIDIA, NXP (Netherlands), Renesas (Tokyo, Japan), Qualcomm, TI, Infineon (Milpitas, CA), STMicro (India), and Xilinx (now part of AMD).
Volkswagen has been using NVIDIA Drive IX Technology since 2018. Baidu’s Apollo Go Robotaxi service uses Baidu’s second-generation Kunlun II AI chip. Samsung is developing special chips for Google’s Waymo.