Late last year, Samsung Electronics hired Benny Katibian, who served as vice president of Qualcomm’s engineering division, as senior vice president of its US company. Katibian took over as head of the Samsung Austin Research Center (SARC) and the Advanced Computing Lab (ACL), the main R&D centers of Samsung Electronics USA.
Katibian is an expert in semiconductors for autonomous driving. He was in charge of the development of self-driving systems such as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) at Qualcomm, then served as COO of the North American company of Xiaopeng, a Chinese company of electric cars, and orchestrated the development of self-driving chips. .
The hire is part of Samsung Electronics’ efforts to expand its vehicle system-on-chip (SoC) business, which has strong growth potential.
Samsung Electronics’ System LSI division provides the Exynos Auto market, an automotive processor based on artificial intelligence (AI). Its first objective is to upgrade the Exynos Auto to strengthen its dominance in the market.
The Exynos Auto is supplied to major European car manufacturers such as Volkswagen and Audi. Samsung also delivered a prototype automotive semiconductor to BMW at the latter’s request.
