indie Semiconductor, Inc. today announced a strategic investment in Expedera Inc, a provider of scalable Neural Processing Unit (NPU) semiconductor intellectual property (IP). The partnership will deliver customized artificial intelligence (AI) enabled processing capabilities for sensing solutions targeting Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and includes a commercial agreement to integrate customized Expedera OriginTM NPU processing solutions into future indie products.
According to S&P Mobility, by 2029 over 50 percent of vehicles will incorporate Level 2 and above driver automation capabilities, representing a $28 billion ADAS semiconductor opportunity. Deployment of these ADAS systems – driven by safety regulation and New Car Assessment Programs (NCAP) – mandates high performance, power efficient AI-based object detection and perception processing to enable functions including Lane Keep Assist (LKA), Blind Spot Detection (BSD), Automated Emergency Braking (AEB) and Driver and Occupant Monitoring (DMS/OMS).
Expedera’s Origin NPU solutions will enhance indie’s growing multi-modal ADAS silicon and software portfolio with advanced Neural Network (NN) processing capabilities. Origin’s unique packet-based architecture brings deterministic performance and efficient power, area and memory resource utilization to on-chip NN processing compared to typical layer-based approaches. The partnership will deliver scalable NPU single-core performance capabilities to indie’s portfolio over 100 TOPS.
“Our mission has always been to deliver best-in-market NPU solutions alongside premier partners, which is why we are so thrilled to welcome this new strategic investment and commercial agreement with indie,” said Da Chuang, co-founder and CEO of Expedera. “As the clear leader in the Autotech market, there is no better partner for our Origin solutions than indie.”
“Since its founding in 2018, Expedera has established itself as the best-in-class, field-proven NPU solution provider,” said Donald McClymont, indie co-founder and CEO. “As we examined the AI opportunity within the automotive market, it became apparent that Expedera’s highly innovative solutions are ideally matched to enabling indie’s ADAS portfolio with customized, high-performance neural processing capabilities. We are excited to team with Expedera and deliver unprecedented AI-enabled sensing solutions to indie’s global customer base.”
The minority investment will include adding Donald McClymont to Expedera’s Board of Directors.