The Smart City brings both technical and legal challenges – and developing the Smart City’s autonomous vehicles combines both. The automotive industry is facing an enormous disruption in the value chain, with hardware and software innovations as key drivers of this transformation. While OEMs previously focused on the desired function, they increasingly target ownership of the differentiating functions implemented in hardware and software. The roles, responsibilities, and ownership are changing throughout the entire value chain.
An open chiplet ecosystem is a new frontier targeting this issue. Chiplets are reshaping the way computers are built: Instead of traditional all-in-one “system on a chip” solutions, these new modular chiplets can be assembled to a set of chiplets like Lego bricks, customized for specific tasks. This allows for sets of chiplets to be assembled for the various automotive applications. If operationalized well, an open chiplet platform will be safer, reduce power use, reduce compute costs, and allow competition in the industry by lowering vendor lock-in.
But how to make these chiplet “bricks” match? The interface definition (i.e. standardization) is the key challenge to establish chiplet technology in the automotive space, both technically and legally.
Against this background, the speakers of this session will discuss different approaches of standardization of a chiplet ecosystem, the impact on intellectual property and licensing, competition law as well as compliance aspects.
