While some tech applications, such as mobile or personal computing, have started to flatten out, the semiconductor industry has seen dramatic growth in the automotive space over the past few years. Many of the big players are focusing their attention on the nascent semiconductor market, thanks to tech like the Internet of Things, as seen in the recent move by Qualcomm Technologies Inc. to acquire NXP Semiconductors N.V., a strong player in automotive controllers.

So where do storage solutions fit into the evolving self-driving car mix?

“It’s not just one system in the car. The systems are going to be distributed, and each of them are going to have their own unique requirements,” said Martin Booth, director of marketing at Western Digital Corp. “It’s not just the autonomous computer; it’s the infotainment, the digital cluster. There is a vehicle-to-vehicle communications module, there’s a telemetrics gateway, there’s a drive recorder and dash cameras … there’s a lot of different applications in the car where there’s going to be storage requirements.”

Booth spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during this year’s Auto Tech Council – Innovation in Motion event in Miltpitas, California. They discussed how Western Digital is positioning itself to tackle the storage needs in the autonomous-vehicle market. (* Disclosure below.)

Extra reliability required

The automotive applications present a new set of reliability requirements for semiconductor devices that must be addressed in order to enter the market, Booth pointed out.

“In a car the temperature ranges that you’re dealing with, the longevity of the product in the field, and the reliability considerations are very different from a mobile phone, for example,” he stated.

Once reliability concerns are alleviated, storage plays a critical role in enabling self-driving vehicles. Although much of the data processing for high-level mapping and algorithms happen in the cloud, the sheer amount of sensor data requires local storage for computation.

“The data is coming at you in gigabytes per second, and that has to be processed locally. You don’t have enough bandwidth to go to the cloud … you need a local copy of the data to do the edge processing,” Booth stated.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Auto Tech Council – Innovation in Motion. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Auto Tech Council – Innovation in Motion. Neither Western Digital Corp., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE