[Featured Stock] Chips&Media Breaks into the Challenging Intel-Mobileye Autonomous Driving Chip Market

[Asia Economy Reporter Hyungsoo Park] Chips&Media is showing strong performance. This is interpreted as a result of growing expectations for growth as the company expands its business area into the autonomous driving chip market.

At 9:29 a.m. on the 16th, Chips&Media was trading at 17,750 KRW, up 9.57% from the previous day.

On this day, a media outlet reported that Chips&Media has recently expanded its footprint into the autonomous driving chip market by supplying design assets to Mobileye, an Intel subsidiary. Based on the achievements of collaborating with Mobileye, it is expected that Chips&Media could also participate in the ‘Google Car Project’ promoted by Google through its autonomous driving subsidiary Waymo in the future.

Mobileye, an autonomous driving-related startup, was founded in 1999 by Dr. Amnon Shashua in Israel. It is a global leader in the advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) field and holds a duopoly over more than 80% of the related chip market. In 2017, Intel acquired Mobileye at a corporate value of about 17 trillion KRW.

An industry insider said, "Intel is known in the industry for having the most stringent partner and supplier selection process," and added, "The fact that a small domestic fabless IP company has entered Intel’s supply chain itself is a noteworthy issue."

Chips&Media has secured ISP (Image Signal Processing) IP and CP (Computational Photography) IP and has been licensing them since 2018. It also owns computer vision IP based on artificial intelligence technology. ISP, CP, and computer vision functions require real-time processing along with low power consumption. Since these functions must be processed as hardware IP embedded in semiconductor chips, like Chips&Media’s video codec IP, it is expected that Chips&Media, which has strengths in semiconductor IP design technology, will have opportunities.

In the industry, there are expectations that Chips&Media will supply IP to Samsung Electronics and Google’s ‘Google Car Project’ this year, but Chips&Media is reported to have officially denied the possibility of collaboration.

Chips&Media is one of the key members of the ‘SAFE Forum,’ a foundry collaboration group of Samsung Electronics. It counts Dutch top-tier automotive infotainment system chip company NXP as a client. Since it has accumulated sufficient references, there is an evaluation that the possibility of collaboration with global companies remains open.