Intel acquired Mobileye to create an advanced platform for autonomous driving systems. While Mobileye’s current focus has been primarily working on camera-based visual analysis systems for their Level 2/3 assisted driving platform, they fully understand that camera-based systems alone do not provide enough redundancy to achieve fully autonomous vehicle systems (Level 4/5) that their upcoming Mobile as a Service offering through the acquisition of Moovit will require.
Indeed, the goal of achieving accident rates 10-100 times better than typical human drivers requires both massive amounts of computational ability, primarily achieved through an advanced AI based approach, detailed granular maps of the immediate vicinity (with Mobileye’s unique Road Experience Management crowd-sourced semantic maps), and an array of sensors that can provide a full 360-degree view in all types of conditions, including with radar and lidar.
While relatively inexpensive and easy to deploy, camera-based visual systems have major challenges when dealing with range and velocity measurements, bad weather or no-light and similarly visually impaired conditions. What is needed is a radar and/or lidar-based system that can “see in the dark” to supplement the camera-based visual systems, as well as add feature definitions not easily obtained by visual processing alone. Radar systems are relatively inexpensive to build, but they include challenges due to limited resolution and the RF nature of their components. Lidar is emerging as a primary system choice for its inherent benefits but is also currently relatively expensive and does not provide velocity information.
Mobileye, using the inherent capabilities available from Intel’s ability to build active and passive components on the same chip substrate, plans to re-invent the radar/lidar sensor. As an example, Intel has been building silicon photonics devices for several years. Indeed, it offers a wide assortment of devices for high-speed networking over optical links. One advantage that Intel has is that the silicon photonics works on the same silicon chips as its computational devices, making it possible to do post- and pre-processing with high amounts of local computational power integrated on the same chip.
The ability to build silicon-based photo emitters, photo diodes, and RF components means that Intel has a unique capability to create high performance sensors with high amounts of analytical capabilities necessary to power future autonomous systems, and do it at a reasonable cost and at scale. Further, due to the ability to integrate sensors and processors, a software defined sensor module can be programmed for specific tasks and much like in Software Defined Network (SDN), it creates a common platform that can address many functions.
One of the areas Mobileye is working on is an advanced lidar system. Current lidar-based systems work by sending out pings and looking for reflections. The time of return determines the distance to the object. Mobileye is creating a Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave lidar system that not only measures distance, but also uses the Doppler-effect to measure velocity. This enables a much more accurate determination of approaching objects with less computational processing needed. Mobileye believes it can create this capability in the next 2-3 years and well ahead of others by leveraging Intel’s advanced silicon photonics capabilities to create a new class of devices.
Bottom Line: By being a part of Intel, Mobileye has the ability to create a new class of radar/lidar components that advance the capabilities needed to achieve Level 4/5 autonomous driving performance while also reducing the overall cost. There are other photonics companies supplying this market as well as several startups.
It remains to be seen if Intel can achieve superior products, but they do have a massive R&D budget and a large organization they can leverage. We believe Intel/Mobileye has a unique advantage and will likely create the best-in-class sensors. It remains to be seen if these devices will be made available to the general market, but we suspect, at least in the early stages, they will remain proprietary to Mobileye-built platforms. This should give Mobileye a big competitive boost in the autonomous vehicle market.
Jack Gold is founder and principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, LLC., an information technology analyst firm based in Northborough, Massachusetts. He has more than 25 years of experience as an analyst and covers the many aspects of business and consumer computing and emerging technologies. He works with many companies. Follow Jack on Twitter and on LinkedIn.