Which Sony fan can think of, Sony has built a car.
At the Sony conference before the CES 2020, Sony showed off its first concept car, the Vision-S.
Although CES has been occupied by car manufacturers in recent years and has become the first choice for various strange concept car debuts, the concept car released by Sony is actually a pity because it is already A concept car with a high degree of completion, rather than a fantasy of a futuristic future.
In terms of size and shape, Vision-S is a bit similar to Tesla Model 3. It is also a four-door hatchback coupe. Sony only introduced it in less than 10 minutes at the press conference. The car did not announce the price, did not announce the price, did not say whether it will really be mass-produced, but only externally said that the car embedded 33 sensors including CMOS and ToF, equipped with an ultra-wide center control display, 360 on-site sound Cooperation partners include Bosch, BlackBerry, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, etc.
Although not explicitly stated, Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida ’s speech revealed Sony ’s intention to make this car: The Vision-S concept car reflects Sony ’s contribution to the future of mobility. This concept car combines Sony’s imaging and sensing, AI, communications and cloud technologies.
The more clear point is that this car is not bought for consumers. This car is used to show technology to manufacturers. Sony can also become a technology supplier for other auto OEMs.
In fact, as early as four or five years ago, Sony started to make arrangements for intelligent driving. Because in autonomous driving and driving assistance technologies that consumers can already experience, vision sensors can be said to be the most important sensor components. Compared with lidar, they are lower in cost, smaller in size, longer in recognition distance and more important Or, the vision sensor can already have a good commercial prospect, and assume the main function of the sensing part of the driver assistance that has already landed.
So in fact, at CES in 2017, Sony once released a 1 / 1.7-inch, CMOS image with the highest resolution in the industry and the industry’s first to adopt a stacked structure (stacked pixel portion and signal processing portion). The sensor “IMX324” was specially developed for autonomous driving and driver assistance systems.
As for how powerful Sony is as a sensor for car companies as the world’s top imaging manufacturer, it can actually be seen in this 2017 IMX324. Compared with the more mainstream self-driving vision sensor CMOS IMX224MQ at the time, Sony ’s CMOS has a horizontal resolution that is 3 times higher. With the help of a FOV 32-degree lens, it can shoot road signs up to 160 meters away from the camera.
To put it in human words, using Sony’s CMOS, the vision of self-driving cars has improved.
More important than the pure technical specifications, the IMX324 at that time was already compatible with Intel ’s subsidiary Mobileye ’s research and development and applied to the images of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving technology. Processor “EyeQ4”, “EyeQ5”.
Mobileye ’s image processor is currently the most commonly used driver assistance solution for luxury car companies.
In other words, Sony’s display is not just for showcasing technology, but can be immediately brought to the market and turned into profit.
Time goes back to just passed 2019. At the end of the year, Bloomberg did a report. At the time, Shimizu Shimizu, a director of Japan ’s Sony Corporation and president of the semiconductor subsidiary, stated that even if Sony has made a large investment to expand , But it is estimated that when the new factory in Nagasaki, Japan starts production in April 2021, CMOSThe image sensor market is still in short supply, and there is no doubt of oversupply.
On the one hand, the urgent demand comes from smartphone makers that increasingly rely on Sony CMOS, and on the other hand, more substantial future revenues actually come from car companies. However, the global market for smartphones has actually been declining year by year, but the demand for vision sensor chips in the automotive industry has been expanding year by year.
At present, the market share of Sony CMOS has exceeded half of the world’s market. The 2018 data is 50.1% of the market share, and the shipment value is 120 US dollars, which is 30% higher than the second Samsung Electronics. The data for 2019 has not yet come out, but it can be estimated that the market share of Sony CMOS will only be more, not less.
In order to be able to control the eyes of the car in the second decade of the 21st century like today’s smartphone images, Sony ’s secret layout is actually larger and earlier than most people think.
In September 2018, Takashi Omura, executive director of Renesas’ automotive industry, joined Sony. Sony noticed Omura’s departure and threw an olive branch at him early. Now Sony has invested 40% of its fresh graduates in the technology direction into the semiconductor sector. According to the talent agency, Sony is also very active in social recruitment. Some analysts have previously stated that Sony will invest up to 700 billion yen in the semiconductor field before 2020.
In addition to the visual sensor, the concept car presented by Sony this time actually uses the advantages of Sony in other electronic fields.
Vision-S’s front section of the car is equipped with an ultra-long penetrating instrument panel display similar to Byton, and also has a “360 realistic audio” technology, allowing passengers in the car to have an immersive audio Experience.