Renesas takes on global giants in growing autonomous vehicle marke

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article published June 19 incorrectly reported that Renesas' system-on-chip costs $799. In fact, the company’s R-Car Starter Kit, which contains one SoC, costs $799.

TOKYO — Japanese automotive microchip maker Renesas Electronics Corp. will start delivering a new line of products for self-driving cars in December as it takes on global giants such as Intel Corp.

The move ignites an ambitious strategy by the Japanese chipmaker to embed itself in the growing field of autonomous vehicles.

Renesas' new technology acts as an onboard nerve center, coordinating and controlling vehicle functions.

It was unveiled in April in a self-driving demo car at a global developer conference here. The technology successfully steered a Lincoln MKZ sedan, bristling with antennas, around a hotel parking lot without a human hand on the wheel.

But the demo also showed how much work is still needed to make such systems compact and affordable.

Dubbed "Renesas Autonomy," the new package includes an image-recognition system that works with automotive cameras, around-view monitors and lidar systems.

The rollout comes as global chipmakers race to sell faster and more powerful processing power for future vehicles. Traditional computer chipmakers, such as Renesas and Intel, are flocking to the automotive sector, partly because they see it as more stable than their saturated and vacillating consumer good markets.

U.S. chip giant Intel agreed in March to buy Israeli autonomous-driving tech company Mobileye for $14.7 billion in a deal that thrusts the U.S. company into direct competition with Renesas, Nvidia Corp. and Qualcomm Inc. to develop self-driving systems.

Worldwide demand is expected to soar as carmakers react to increasingly stringent safety standards.

"This is really what's driving volume," said Shinichi Yoshioka, Renesas' vice president in charge of automotive microprocessors.

Yoshioka contends that Renesas has an edge because it can supply chips that handle sensing, decision-making and vehicle control — as well as chips that handle communication.

"We are covering most of the areas," he said.

Renesas plans to deliver samples of the upcoming system — using a chip it calls the R-Car V3M SoC — to customers in December and start mass production in June 2019.

Renesas is already the world's largest supplier of automotive microprocessors. The umbrella term covers both system-on-chip, or SoC, semiconductors and microcontrollers, or MCUs, the semiconductors that control everything from fuel injection to power windows.

Renesas expects the global market for chips in advanced safety systems and electrified vehicles to explode. It forecasts worldwide sales of chips for electrification to book continuous annual growth of 18 percent through 2020. Advanced safety system sales should grow at a steady 17 percent clip. That compares with sales growth of 5 percent or less in the traditional segments of supplying chips for powertrains, chassis control or infotainment.

Chip sales are surging because every time a carmaker adds a camera, lidar, radar or radio to a vehicle for safety or communication, another chip is needed to run it.

What's more, Renesas' more sophisticated computer systems usually require three chips as a safety redundancy. The chips back up each other by performing the same task. If there were only two chips and one of them malfunctioned, the system would be unable to determine which chip is correct. With three, the system can isolate the malfunction by the chips' two-against-one vote.

"We have such know-how because we have been developing such systems for many years," says Naoto Iga, senior manager for Renesas' global advanced driver assist systems center.

Renesas began developing its autonomous driving chips in toy cars in 2013. But it moved to the Lincoln outfitted as an experimental self-driving vehicle this year.

"My boss was not satisfied," Iga says. "He wanted to see it in a real car."

The Lincoln test car is outfitted with millimeter-wave radar and a camera up front. The roof is loaded with a cylindrical lidar sensor, two disc-shaped global positioning system transponders and assorted antennas for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication.

The trunk is even more crowded.

There, two shoebox-size packs house the computer firepower that enables the Lincoln to drive itself. Inside each box are two SoCs and one MCU. They are also equipped with fans to keep them cool.

For now, these systems will be sold only to auto manufacturers and suppliers for use in their r&d work on autonomous driving. Renesas expects the products to make their way into production cars after 2020, Iga said.

Cost varies, depending on the chip's processing power. But the technology isn't cheap. Each Renesas R-Car starter kit, which includes one SoC, costs $799. That pushes the cost of the two shoebox-size systems northward of $3,000.

Yoshioka estimates that cost needs to drop to between $10 and $100 for the technology to catch on in mass-market production vehicles.

Size and packaging are additional hurdles. The setups have to be big enough to accommodate the chips as well as a plethora of ports for communication cables. And if packaging shrinks too much, they are prone to overheating.

Still, Renesas says there are several solutions, such as putting the processing boxes under seats, on the sides of the trunk or even inside pillars or the dashboard.