Samsung is not only a big player in the field of consumer electronics, it is also active in an industry that is predicted to have a big future - autonomous vehicles. Now, news has hit the airwaves that the South Korean tech giant has teamed up with the automaker Tesla, to jointly develop a chip to power the fully autonomous functionality of its electric cars.
Tesla has been working on its own autonomous driving chip since 2016. It was introduced three years later as part of its Hardware 3.0 autonomous driving computer. The head of the car company, Elon Musk, revealed at the time that it had already started designing the next-generation chip. Earlier reports indicated that it will use semiconductor giant TSMC's 7nm process for its production.
However, a new report from South Korea claims that Tesla's chip manufacturing partner will be Samsung instead of TSMC, and that the chip will be manufactured using a 5nm process. Its foundry division is said to have already started research and development work.
This is not the first time that Samsung and Tesla have joined forces. Samsung already produces the aforementioned chip for autonomous driving for Tesla, but it is built on a 14nm process. The technology giant is said to use a 5nm EUV process to manufacture the chip.
The report adds that the new chip won't go into production until the last quarter of this year, so we'll most likely find out sometime next year how it improves the autonomous driving of Tesla cars.
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