Sanjay Gupta, Vice President & India Country Manager, NXP India Pvt. Ltd.
As the world leader in secure connectivity solutions for embedded applications, NXP is driving innovation in the secure connected vehicle, end-to-end security & privacy and smart connected solutions markets. Here is the interaction with Mr. Sanjay Gupta, Vice President & India Country Manager, NXP India Pvt Ltd conducted by Vaishali Umredkar of Electronics Maker asking about automotive semiconductor growth, key trends and innovations happening that drives future growth.
How is automotive semiconductor growth in India? And what are the biggest opportunities from NXP is looking for in India?
Based on predictions, we can easily say that today the automotive industry is at a juncture where mobile industry was 20 years ago. With time, the mobile industry bloomed and we have seen it taking leaps and bounds which broke all records globally. India, in particular became the nation with highest number of mobile phone users. In coming time, similar will be the case for automotive.
Today we would like to replicate the scenario for a simple reason, on an average in a regular day we spend good amount of time in our vehicles be it due to tiresome traffic on the road or long distance travels that we have to undertake. In other parts of the world, they are culturally used to travelling long distances, hence, it’s easy for someone in US to plan a self-driving road trip for 7-8 hours but in India, it might not be that easy due to reasons like traffic and road infrastructure.
So we can say that people irrespective of countries like to imitate behavior or the convenience that they feel in their living rooms in the vehicles they drive. Car Infotainment for example, is one of the fastest growing industry where the traditional dashboard system is getting converted into a very fancy digital speedometer, digital fuel indicator and digital odometer. Gadget to gadget connectivity is another feature that we expect in our car these days. A Bluetooth, GPS connectivity for navigational aids and various other gadgets that we want to include in our automotive are the basic technologies that are driving the growth in automotive world.
Talking about ADAS and IOT from NXP’s perspective, we strongly feel that these technologies would drive the automotive industry in future. This is our one of the key focus areas and we have a dedicated R&D team working on it. Today, we can proudly say that we are world’s number one automotive semiconductor company and we are confident that we would be able to maintain our leadership in the market.
When it comes to ADAS, we have low, mid and high range RADARS, in which we are number one right now, we are already having chips and solutions in the market which our customers have started using. Within ADAS, there is another technology using VISION technology as well. So radar is something which is more of a passive device which can give u alerts from 360 degrees. It will create a halo around the car and if something comes within the range it would warn the driver.
Share your insights on future smart car and what are the advancements?
Smart cars are nothing but running robots which have eyes and eyes are nothing but multiple cameras/sensors which are fitted across the autonomous body and are feeding the information real time in an HD format feeding into microcontrollers and electronics which has to mimic human brain. So just imagine that you are driving a car, for every decision that you are taking your brain is thinking about hundred possibilities in parallel, like from here a cow is coming, from here a man is coming, from here a vehicle is taking a left turn, human brain is processing all this information through your eyes feeding it back to our brain and our brain is processing this information feeding it in a micro controller and then we are taking a decision to apply brakes. Just imagine this is now replicated into a robot which is nothing but a future car. The eyes are equivalent to a camera and all this information gets converted from analog to digital and this conversion is done by various different peripherals that are fitted in our chips which are moving concurrently through very high speed data buses (like a water pipe and millions of gallons of water is flooding from various different pipes) into a central server that nothing but the VISION information and there is one intelligent computer that is decoding this digital information into digital format to find trends which are mapped against a predetermined look up table.
Converting the video information into digital information itself has various stages of hardware and software together and eventually the final decision to be taken goes to a different controller or applications controller which is equivalent to human putting a break or taking left or right steering moment. So just imagine all these things require very intense hardware and software working at a high level of sophistication.
We already have prototypes in the market where the customers are evaluating and giving us feedbacks because it is not easy to mimic human brain. It will really help the users and since these robots will be talking to each other so the other technology equally valid in ADAS world beyond radar and vision is vehicle to vehicle communication.
What is today’s layer for above discussed automotive innovation in India and what is NXP contributing in that?
Today, we are at driver assistant stage. In semi-autonomous cars we have pre-defined speed limits that we have to adhere. There are a lot of regulations in this realm of driving as we are just entering a new era of driving as human life is of utmost importance.
In a Geneva Convention it was decided that driver has to put his hands on the steering or you can’t lift your hands more than some duration in a semi-autonomous car under a specific speed limit. There are lot of regulations because this is a starting point and obviously human life is very important so one has to be extra cautious.
This technology is being used by many countries already like for fleet of trucks and taxi services, Google in its own campus has a dedicated trial on Google car in restricted path so that it does not cause any accidentin real world.
Just like the trend in mobile industry, eventually the cost for advanced technologies would drastically reduce in coming time and would be available for the masses. In the same way, most of the high end cars may have some partial features, like Volvo already has a feature where it can detect an obstruction in front and one can automatically apply brakes. But all these are based on very costly technology, also there cannot be mass percolation. So I would say that right now we are in the stage two driver assist, so there are lot of features with whom a driver gets help like the blind spot if there is a car on the left or right side too close so that that rear view mirror starts blinking, featureslike parking assist have already started coming.
The entire automotive world is striving to make it happen. We have all the right technologies both in analog and digital world to make it happen so I am very confident that these are the trends which going to fuel the future growth.
What are your views on Auto IoT and how it drives smart automotive?
In automotive, Internet of Things is nothing but Internet of Cars, as eventually we would imagine our home, our office our entire life essentials available inside a car. For the above said, all we require is a seamless connectivity. Some of the advanced cards today would have software technology equivalent to that of an aircraft. Just like our phones get a software patch and we only need to install it same way the market research is indicating us that eventually our software would be enabling us to advance the features. There will not be a need to change the hardware every time. If we have this software based up gradation, it will help companies to save both indirect and indirect cost up to the great extent. So whether it be voice recognition, Human to Machine, Machine to Machine or Infrastructure to Machine for GPS connectivity, everything have to be seamlessly securely connected.
This brings an important concept of security of this connected network. Any Hacker can interfere in this connectivity and add some bug, this whole network of connected things will turn into a disaster. In recent past have a seen demo shown by a hacker which highlights how one can control everything in the car from windshields to breaks of the cars. While, we are talking about seamless connectivity, everything has to be 100percent secured from server till human interface. IoT can only succeed if you have seamless connectivity and security. And NXP stands for these both standards, our logo also says ‘Secure Connections for a Smarter World‘. Hence, NXP will be able to take this challenge successfully as we already have R&D work happening in both hardware and software around security.
We have dedicated teams for connectivity and security in automotive. Not only this, going beyond the realm of automotive we are one of the market leaders when it comes to secure payment transactions. We are rightly placed to leverage the skill set technology to be the world leader in all areas related to consumer security and connectivity.
We have collaboration with various software companies from the application prospective and bright products are already in pipeline to execute.
