Radar for automotive: new market dynamic for new players’ positioning

Yole Intelligence, part of Yole Group releases today the Radar for Automotive 2022 report. This technology and market study analyzes the technical challenges and business opportunities. With this new report, the market research and strategy consulting company provides a comprehensive overview of the radar technologies applied to automotive applications, as well as detailed market data. Yole’s analysts deliver a valuable understanding of the value chain, infrastructure, and competitive landscape. This report is one of the comprehensive RF electronics collection of products, including technology & market reports, monitors, and dedicated teardowns offered by Yole and its partner Yole SystemPlus. The analysis of the technology evolution and strategic choices made by the leading radar companies has been further developed in this new automotive radar report, thanks to the Automotive Radar Comparison report from Yole SystemPlus.
Yole SystemPlus has developed a core radar expertise with dedicated technology and reverse engineering experts. All year long, analysts deliver a comprehensive understanding of the RF industry, combining technical insights and market evolution.

Indeed, besides integration, RF performance has dramatically improved over time. Initially, radars operated with analog beamforming and mechanical steering before moving to digital beamforming (full scene illumination). In the digital beamforming era, MIMO techniques have been introduced, enabling an increase of the virtual antenna aperture while maintaining a reasonable physical size. Currently, MIMO scaling is offered by the industry (from 0.2k to 2k pixels) as the baseline for achieving sub-1° angular resolution for imaging radars. This comes with new challenges needing to be overcome on the signal processing and computing side, which explains why the focus is shifting towards deep learning and artificial intelligence.

The automotive radar market has drawn increasing interest over the past few years. At the system level, the market is led by six major Tier 1s: Continental, Bosch, Hella, Denso, Aptiv, and Veoneer. Yole SystemPlus analyzed in detail the technologies and related costs of the main radar systems and their chipsets, including radars from Continental, Bosch, Denso, and others, in its Automotive Radar Comparison 2021 report.
Meanwhile, at the silicon level, NXP and Infineon Technologies share most of the market. Even though the radar market has been well established for many years, Yole’s analysts see many new players positioning and gaining design wins, either at the system level with Magna, Mobis, Weifu, etc., or at the silicon level with Arbe, Uhnder, and Vayyar. And there are more to come, as giant tech companies are also investing in radar development. Therefore, leading companies, including Huawei, Qualcomm, Intel… are deeply involved in this domain. OEMs seeking new revenue sources and eager to differentiate for survival are keen on direct discussions with these companies, shortlisting their traditional suppliers. This is resulting in intense pressure on leading Tier 1s and semiconductor companies that need to innovate faster than their usual time cycle. Therefore, the leading players are seeking synergies either by proceeding to consolidation or moving to vertical integration.