Automotive at CES

Automotive was huge at CES. A lot of it went for the glamour without really having much electronics, concept cars which will never see the light of day. But increasingly cars are about electronics. As I told someone recently, a couple of years ago, nobody had ever heard of ISO 26262, and now it is the most important number in semiconductor.

The opening keynote at CES was given by Jen-Hsun Huang of NVIDIA. Everyone thinks of them as a graphics and gaming company, which of course they are. But they have been re-inventing the company. It looks like they will end up being the most successful company in the S&P 500 last year, based on revenue growth. Not the most successful semiconductor company, the most successful company. Last quarter they grew by 50%. I think future growth will be more likely to come from data center add-on processors, and in the longer run, from automotive. In gaming, they are already so large that they can't really grow faster than the market. And, as usual, PC sales were down again this year. So this picture below may be one of the most important in semiconductor.

There is a big battle starting in automotive, with the semiconductor companies lining up with car companies. Qualcomm will be the biggest company in automotive semiconductor with the acquisition of NXP, but NVIDIA has a strong presence. They had a huge booth at CES.

The most important technology is vision, recognition and AI. These all require a complex mixture of cloud computing to do the training stuff, and then power sensitive on board processing in the vehicle, since you can't rely on the internet connection to the cloud not dropping just at the moment a kid runs into the road. NVIDIA is strong in both of these markets. Qualcomm was already very strong (pre NXP) in automotive communications. And, of course, Intel is the powerhouse in the datacenter, although famously "missed" mobile. Of course there are other companies such as Renasas with strong positions and relationships, especially in Japan and Europe. But automotive is in transition from "old" automotive, with analog heavy designs running on processes that have been characterized intensely for years if not decades, to "new" automotive, with high speed digital, Ethernet and video. It remains to be seen if a strong position in "old" automotive like NXP, Infineon and Renasas can be turned into a strong position in "new" automotive that depends on a different set of IP and design capabilities and cannot, generally, be manufactured in any of the existing automotive fabs, but need leading edge process nodes and foundries.

Every car company had a huge booth at CES. VW, Mercedes, Ford, Honda, Hyundai, and more. (Those were just a few of the ones that I recall, so leaving out a name is not significant, it is just the order of how I wandered around the floor.) There were various demos of self-driving capability, some using virtual reality and some using real vehicles out in the parking lot.

It used to be that the keynote of keynotes at CES was Microsoft (of course Apple doesn't go). But this year NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Nissan all gave keynotes. If you have time, you can watch all the keynotes (and a lot more CES stuff) at the video site for the show CES-TV.

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