Autonomous cars will be a big part of SEMICON West, slated for July 10-12, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.

The event will include a Smart Transportation Pavilion, as the  automotive market leads all new application spaces for semiconductor growth, and has a major impact on boosting demand for adjacencies like FHE and MEMS & Sensors. Attendees can discover opportunities, meet key players, and learn how to capitalize on the explosive growth in demand at the pavilion.

SEMI, a global industry association serving the manufacturing supply chain for the electronics industry, expects next week’s event to havwe a strong emphasis on the automotive market.

SEMI states:The fast-growing automotive semiconductor market means big change for the IC supply chain. Beyond the obvious demands for reliability and traceability, the sector is moving towards simpler and lower-cost solutions while facing the daunting challenge of automating driving in a complex world. The need for simpler and cheaper automotive intelligence will likely drive acquisitions to build complete platform solutions that are easier to integrate. This demand has already spawned a market for pre-configured test cars to save developers time and money, and is driving LiDAR (Light Detection And RADAR) towards lower-cost, solid state solutions.

“The growth of the automotive electronics market provides a great opportunity for the IC supply chain to differentiate on specialty processes and quality for the high-volume automotive business with its long design cycles,” says Scott Jones, principal, strategy, at KPMG, in a press release. “This differentiation is a chance to reduce chip suppliers’ dependence on scaling volume for the mobile phone world with its short-cycle volatility of winning and losing sockets.” Jones, who will speak at SEMICON West, notes that increasing demand for automotive ICs is also reinvigorating the eight-inch supply chain and spurring opportunity for specialty products such as compound semiconductor devices for power efficiency.

AutonomouStuff
AutonomouStuff is helping to speed development of these platforms. The company has grown from a sensor distributor into a supplier in the emerging niche of vehicles preconfigured with key interfaces for sensors and controls. These interfaces can then be customized by integrating different components for developers to test their applications.

“Whether they’re major chipmakers or AI software startups, they don’t have a year to build their own vehicle platforms themselves for developing autonomous vehicle systems,” says Wolfgang Juchmann, VP sales and business development at AutonomouStuff, also in the press release. Juchmann, a SEMICON West speaker, will bring a demonstration vehicle to the show. “In four to six weeks we can prepare a custom test car with selected sensors, enabling users to start testing their computer platforms and software. It’s faster and more cost-effective for us to supply the car with the needed interfaces.”

He notes that developers are using some 300 AutonomouStuff vehicles in the field. AutonomouStuff customers are starting to transition from testing on a single car or two to testing on mini-fleets with 50 to 100 vehicles. Beyond sensors and pre-configured vehicles, the next step will be to add more data intelligence services to help with capabilities like tagging the data for training, Juchmann says.

For more information on the event’s agenda, click here   Registration details, can be found here.