Yousef Khalilollahi, who serves as the vice president at Xilinx, said that FPGA (field-programmable gate array) can be utilized in various fields including automotive semiconductor market and showed his confidence about FPGAs being utilized in the automotive semiconductor market.
FPGA is an integrated circuit that can be programmed by a user after manufacturing and it has recently started to draw attention from the AI market. During an era of AI, various IT devices need to receive information in different forms at the same time. Unlike semiconductors such as CPU or GPU that are already programmed, FPGAs that can be programmed depending on a specific purpose are more flexible in such environment.
FPGAs are also utilized much in the automotive market. Xilinx has been gradually upgrading its FPGA technology in order to deal with IT technologies that are being used more and more by the automotive market.
The company currently supplies chips that are utilized for DMS (driver monitoring system) that frequently checks condition of the driver and raises safety level and ICMS (in-cabin monitoring system) that checks condition of the inside of a car to various automakers.
“Xilinx currently supplies ‘Zync’ chip that is made through 28nm process and 16nm-based ‘Zynz UltraScale+’ to customers that materialize DMS and ICMS.” said Vice President Yousef. “It can be said that our company is currently involved in every field related to autonomous driving as our ‘Versal’ chip based on 7nm process can deal with level 3 and level 4 of autonomous driving.”
Vice President Yousef said that FPGA’s biggest competitive edge is its ability to maximize applications and expansion as it allows customers to upgrade their hardware and software in their way.
He also expressed confidence in that Xilinx is the only one that can cover FPGAs in the automotive semiconductor market while there may be competitors in the current FPGA market.
Vice President Yousef predicted that the automotive semiconductor market will start to expand at a rapid rate in the future.
“Because semiconductors are used for high-end cars and entry models, shipments and profitability of automotive semiconductors will only go up.” said Vice President Yousef.
While avoiding conversations about the recent phenomenon of lack of supply in the automotive semiconductor market, Vice President Yousef said that Xilinx is putting in various efforts in order to overcome the current situation.
Regarding the automotive market in South Korea, he said that the company is working with both automakers and various auto parts manufacturers.
Staff Reporter Kang, Hyeryung | kang@etnews.com