To Accelerate Development of Autonomous Driving Chips
At the end of last year, Samsung Electronics hired Benny Katibian, who served as vice president of Qualcomm’s engineering division, as a senior vice president of its U.S. corporation. Katibian took office as the head of the Samsung Austin Research Center (SARC) and Advanced Computing Lab (ACL), the core R&D centers of Samsung Electronics USA.
Katibian is an expert in semiconductors for autonomous driving. He was in charge of developing self-driving systems such as advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) at Qualcomm, and later served as COO of the North American corporation of Xiaopeng, a Chinese electric car company, and orchestrated the development of self-driving chips.
This recruitment is part of Samsung Electronics’ efforts to expand its system-on-chip (SoC) business for vehicles, which has big growth potential.
Samsung Electronics’ System LSI Division is supplying the Exynos Auto, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based automotive processor, to the market. Its first goal is to upgrade the Exynos Auto to strengthen its market dominance.
The Exynos Auto is being supplied to key European automakers such as Volkswagen and Audi. Samsung has also delivered an automotive semiconductor prototype to BMW at the latter's request.