Volkswagen Group plans to develop its own advanced semiconductors in China to power its locally made semi-autonomous vehicles, ramping up efforts to regain ground in the world’s largest car market amid heightened competition, reports the South China Morning Post. The German carmaker on Wednesday said Carizon—a venture it jointly owned with Horizon Robotics, a designer of artificial intelligence integrated circuits—would develop a system-on-a-chip (SoC) that would be delivered in the next three to five years.
“We are accelerating and deepening the implementation of our ‘In China, for China’ strategy—moving beyond localised production to mastering the core technologies that shape tomorrow’s mobility,” said Ralf Brandsatter, VW China’s chairman and CEO. “The Volkswagen chip will be developed with our Chinese customers at heart.”
The SoC—designed to process data generated by an autonomous vehicle’s cameras and sensors—would have computing power of between 500 and 700 tera operations per second (TOPS)—a unit of measurement for the number of trillions of operations it can perform in one second.