A new breed of software engineer

Software is king.

Now that smart cars can evade road obstacles, display 3-D maps and respond to voice commands, the software and electronics hardware for these features can cost more than a vehicle's raw metal.

According to an estimate by IHS Automotive, the price tag for a vehicle's software can range from $350 to $1,050.

The electronics hardware -- that is, the computer chips, displays and user controls that put this software to use -- can add another $2,000 to $6,000 to a vehicle's cost, says Egil Juliussen, a researcher for IHS Automotive.

"Software is the major factor, and in some cases the deciding factor" in an automaker's decision to buy a particular component, Juliussen said.

As suppliers beef up their software development, the hunt for software talent has taken on the urgency of a gold rush.

"Software expertise is in short supply in any industry, and certainly in the auto industry," Juliussen said. "That's why suppliers are opening up research centers in Silicon Valley -- it's easier to attract talent."

To cope with the software engineer shortage, suppliers such as Visteon Corp. are turning to unconventional sources -- such as the movie and video game industries -- to recruit people such as Kyle Entsminger.

Before he joined Visteon's advanced product design team in 2011, Entsminger, 34, earned his software chops as a video game developer and special effects editor for the movie industry.

Now, he's working on a new graphic display for a concept cockpit that may, among other things, feature 3-D images, perhaps even holograms.

At this early stage, Visteon is cagey about the type of data that might be displayed, or whether the company will display it at the International CES in January in Las Vegas.

In the meantime, Entsminger will continue to scout the consumer electronics industry for new technology and find new uses for it. "We dream up cool stuff, and then the sales staff pitches it to the automakers," he said.

The trick is to make infotainment data available to the motorist without distracting him with a string of menus on the center console screen, Entsminger says. To create intuitive controls, Entsminger is developing a system that responds to hand gestures, voice commands and head-tracking technology.

If the motorist looks at the radio, for example, the computer awaits instructions for an audio selection. "The goal is to get rid of [long] menus," Entsminger said. "You don't want to create a whole menu of commands."

Before he joined Visteon, Entsminger ran his own Dallas-based video game company, Perpetual FX Creative.

Entsminger developed expertise in gesture control when he designed the "Alien Monster Bowling League" game for Nintendo. But his company ran out of money in 2010 when it produced an ill-fated rodeo game for a couple of Texas oilmen.

It was a tricky job. How, for example, do you simulate a lasso flying through the air?

Sony eventually shut down that project, and Entsminger moved back to Detroit -- where he had grown up -- with his fiancée. After a chance encounter with a Visteon executive at a party, Entsminger joined the company.

While infotainment accounts for the lion's share of a vehicle's software, collision avoidance generates the second biggest chunk of code.

Because it's a safety technology, some automakers prefer to develop key portions of the software in-house. "BMW adds a lot of software integration in the final stages, much more so than Kia, which buys black boxes," Juliussen said. "Other companies are in between."

But even companies such as BMW, Volvo and Audi don't write all their software. Which is why more than 70 percent of chipmaker Nvidia's 9,500 employees are engineers -- most of them software developers.

One of them is Mike Houston, a 36-year-old senior software engineer who helped "train" Nvidia's Tegra X1 graphics chip, which will power future collision avoidance systems.

Houston, who received his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University, is an expert in "deep neural networks" that help computers identify previously unseen objects. Facebook used this technology to develop facial recognition software, and now Houston is helping adapt it for collision avoidance.

For autonomous vehicles, the biggest problem on city streets is a vehicle or object that the computer can't identify and thus cannot anticipate. The solution: Let each vehicle consult a central supercomputer, which identifies the obstacle by analyzing millions of images transmitted from other cars.

To evaluate the chip's capability, Houston and his team drove six test vehicles around Santa Clara, Calif., for a couple of weeks in November and December. Their task: Develop algorithms to let the computer distinguish different types of vehicles.

The team collected 40 hours of video of cars, then tagged them -- sports car, SUV, police car, fire truck -- and fed them to the computer. Then the computer learned how to identify them even if they were partially obscured.

But certain traffic conditions proved tricky. In a construction zone, how should the computer interpret the flagman's hand signals? "If we had no humans on the road and just autonomous vehicles, it would be a much easier problem," Houston said.

While infotainment and collision avoidance require the auto industry's most cutting-edge software, the entire vehicle is getting smarter. (See story, above.)

By 2020, sales of semiconductors for "body and convenience" (i.e. adjustable seats, self-dimming LED headlamps, etc.) will rise 43 percent from 2014, according to a forecast by IHS Automotive.

And sales of semiconductors for powertrains are expected to jump 40 percent. Where one electronic control unit might be sufficient for a conventional gasoline engine, hybrid powertrains require as many as five, says researcher Ahad Buksh of IHS Automotive.

"As more features are employed, the electronics are really advanced," Buksh said. "There is a lot of performance being added, and that has a significant impact on software."

The result? Automotive suppliers are suffering a chronic shortage of software engineers, and they are poaching talent from other industries.

For example, after Entsminger joined Visteon in 2011, he recruited Aaron Forsman, a former associate who worked for his video game company in Dallas.

As a teenager, Forsman taught himself to write code for video games, then dropped out of college and supported himself as a freelance game developer and professional poker player.

"I taught myself everything that I know," Forsman said.

Now that Forsman is a member of Visteon's innovation team, he's helping Entsminger write code for the concept cockpit.

"Somebody like Aaron would have been completely overlooked had he applied for a job through normal channels," Entsminger said. "'Do you have a degree? No?' Aaron wouldn't have gotten an interview. The computer would have kicked out his resume."