by Chet Babla, SVP of Strategic Marketing
The automotive industry is experiencing technology disruption at a level not seen since Ford rolled his first Model-T off the production line in 1908. Automotive OEMs and Tier 1s are rapidly evolving their vehicle electrical and electronic platforms to meet the needs of both safety regulators and more demanding consumers that expect better all-round vehicle experiences. This evolution brings tremendous technical challenges for the semiconductor-based electronics systems that pervade modern vehicles.
The COVID pandemic has distressed global supply chains and wreaked havoc on vehicle production for OEMs. As a result, the critical nature of semiconductors to the automotive industry has been brought into sharp focus. In spite of these temporal challenges, the automotive semiconductor market will grow from $52.1B in 2021 to an estimated $105.1B in 2027[1]. This represents an enviable CAGR of 12.4%.
All of this has created an ideal opportunity for indie Semiconductor, an Autotech semiconductor solutions provider focused on addressing current and future challenges facing today’s automotive OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers.
So why is indie different?
indie has become one of the industry’s fastest growing Autotech innovators with more than 500 employees and a presence in 15 countries. And as we announced on our second-quarter earnings call, we are on-track to end 2002 with revenues in excess of $100 million. We launched on the NASDAQ in June 2021 and, since then, have made a number of strategic acquisitions to complement our organic growth, including photonic component specialist TeraXion and Analog Devices’ Symeo radar division. To date indie has delivered over 150 million SoCs and we estimate our semiconductor solutions are shipping in one in four new cars.
Unlike other semiconductor vendors that deal across multiple markets, indie is a ‘pure-play’ Autotech specialist focused solely on creating technologies for the automotive sector. Our differentiated product portfolio addresses three key automotive megatrends; driver safety and automation, in-cabin user experience (UX), and electrification. Whether it’s multi-modal sensing for road safety and vehicle automation, user-customizable exterior and interior lighting designs, advanced in-cabin charging systems or solutions for EVs, each of these focus areas is seeing unprecedented rates of change. That’s why we estimate that the potential market for indie’s automotive semiconductor solutions will reach $48 billion by 2027.
To address this opportunity, indie brings together mixed-signal semiconductor, software, and system expertise to create next-generation, best-in-class technologies that will improve performance, simplify implementation, and support application-level differentiation.
Surya™ LiDAR system-on-chip (SoC) combines indie’s innovative high-speed analog, mixed-signal, DSP and software with TeraXion’s best-in-class laser and sensing technologies. Featuring unrivalled levels of hardware and software integration and representing a major step forward in terms of power, performance, and cost, Surya will allow automotive OEMs and Tier 1 manufacturers to harness the potential of LiDAR for supporting maximum levels of safety in new generations of assisted and self-driving cars.
And this is only the start of our journey. We continue to ramp up the development of innovative new technologies that anticipate and address demands from OEMs and Tier 1 customers for step function increases in electronic performance and complexity – technologies that will position indie as the premier supplier of embedded and highly integrated mixed-signal solutions for driver safety and automation, in-cabin UX and electrification. Alongside this technology development, we will continue to establish regional ‘Centers of Excellence’ that provide our rapidly expanding customer base with access to the local engineering and field support resources that will help them build the vehicles of the future.
In forthcoming blogs, we will look in detail at each of the key automotive megatrends that indie addresses and find out how design challenges can be met with next-generation SoC technologies. This starts with our next blog, where we take a look at the sensing technologies and architectures that are critical to realizing indie’s vision of the Uncrashable Car.