Mobileye (NYSE: MBLY) has introduced its fourth generation system-on-chip, the EyeQ4. The EyeQ4 has 14 computing cores, of which 10 are specialized vector accelerators with extremely high utilization for visual processing and understanding. The Israeli company, headquartered in Jerusalem, is no longer billing itself as developing collision avoidance systems but rather as designing and developing camera-based Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS).
Mobileye has already agreed a deal, which will see EyeQ4 used in series production by a major European car manufacturer from early 2018.
Mobileye says that EyeQ4 will be part of a scalable camera system starting from monocular processing for collision avoidance applications, in compliance with EU NCAP, US NHSTA and other regulatory requirements, up to trifocal camera configuration supporting high-end customer functions including semi-autonomous driving. The EyeQ4 will support fusion with radars and scanning-beam lasers in the high-end customer functions.
Mobileye co-founder, chairman and CTO Prof. Amnon Shashua said, "Supporting a camera centric approach for autonomous driving is essential as the camera provides the richest source of information at the lowest cost package. To reach affordable high-end functionality for autonomous driving requires a computing infrastructure capable of processing many cameras simultaneously while extracting from each camera high-level meaning such as location of multiple types of objects, lanes and drivable path information."
He added, "The EyeQ4 continues a legacy that began in 2004 with EyeQ1 where we leveraged deep understanding of computer vision processing to come up with highly optimized architectures to support extremely intensive computations at automotive compliant power consumption of 2-3 watts."
Engineering samples of EyeQ4 are expected to be available by the fourth quarter of 2015. First test hardware with the full suite of applications including active safety suite of customer functions, environmental modeling (for each of the 8 cameras), path planning for hands-free driving and fusion with sensors, is expected to be available in the second quarter of 2016.
The company's share price rose 3% on the NYSE to $34.81, giving a market cap of $7.5 billion. Mobileye's share price is up from $25 at its IPO last August.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on March 5, 2015
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