NXP teams with French company on self-driving car chips

Kalray SA

08/01/2019 18:00

By Stephen Nellis
    Jan 8 (Reuters) - Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors NV
 NXPI.O  said on Tuesday it will team up with French chip firm
Kalray SA  ALKAL.PA  to craft computers for self-driving cars,
in an effort they hope will ease the path to winning future
approval of their computers from safety regulators. 
    NXP has long supplied chips to the automotive market and
boasts deep ties in that industry, one reason that Qualcomm Inc
 QCOM.O  agreed to pay $44 billion for the firm even though the
deal was eventually abandoned.  urn:newsml:reuters.com:*:nL4N1Y82BA
    But NXP has never specialized in the kind of heavy-duty
computing chips required to interpret the mass of sensor data
that helps self-driving cars "see" the road.
    Ever since the Qualcomm deal fell apart last year after
failing to win Chinese regulatory approval, NXP has sought to
chart a new path while larger rivals like its erstwhile suitor
and Nvidia Corp  NVDA.O  push deeper into the nascent
self-driving car computer market with increasingly powerful
processors.
    To obtain the computing muscle needed to help cars "see," 
NXP said on Tuesday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las
Vegas it will team with a 10-year-old French chip firm that
started in the aerospace sector. Kalray makes what is known as a
parallel processor, which, similar to chips made by Nvidia,
excels at processing the visual data that cars will use to see
the road.
    Kalray Chief Executive Eric Baissus told Reuters in an
interview that chip reliability has long been the company's
focus because of its aerospace history. Its chips have 288
so-called cores that can each be run independently, so that if
one fails another can take over without the chip missing a beat.
    "The whole architecture has been designed with safety in
mind," he said.
    Kamal Khouri, head of NXP's advanced driver assistance unit,
said in an interview that automakers have told the Dutch chip
firm that proving the safety of self-driving computers is a key
challenge. That can be harder when the two elements of
self-driving - interpreting the sensor data that helps the car
see the road, and making so-called path-planning decisions about
how to drive - are combined. 
    Khouri said automakers think it will be easier to prove
systems are safe in a segmented system like NXP's, where
Kalray's chips will do the seeing and NXP's chip will make the
driving decisions.
    "It's not so much about putting technology out there it's
about asking ourselves how we solve some of these really complex
safety problems," he said.

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Move aside, backseat driver! New tech at CES monitors you inside
car     urn:newsml:reuters.com:*:nL1N1Z401F
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 (Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco
Editing by Matthew Lewis)
 ((Stephen.Nellis@thomsonreuters.com
+1 (415) 344-4934))