With the smartphone market becoming increasingly saturated, many impacted companies are looking at other avenues of growth. Samsung has been aggressively pursuing opportunities in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet-of-Things (IoT), 5G solutions, and more. Autonomous driving is also supposed to be one such area of interest for the South Korean company, corroborated by the unveiling of its DRVLINE self-driving car platform at CES 2018.
According to The Korean Herald, Samsung is now apparently hiring many software engineers working in the autonomous driving space. “Samsung is looking for working-level engineers with over five years of experience at global automotive companies to hire as part of a new team,” a source told to the publication.
Large-scale reallocation of the workforce
The move is seen as an attempt by Samsung to launch a new business unit as early as next year for autonomous driving solutions – a claim denied by the company so far. The new business unit, if set up, could be part of the System LSI Business of the Device Solutions division, the report says. Samsung’s System LSI Business already makes application processors and image sensors for automobiles.
The report further states that around 200 engineers were transferred from the company’s Semiconductor R&D Center to strengthen the software development workforce in the System LSI Business group. This large-scale reallocation of the workforce is viewed by the industry watchers as an indication of Samsung’s growing interest in the modern automotive sector.
Along with hiring new engineers, the company is also reportedly bringing all the autonomous driving related talent within the company under one roof. All these employees are expected to work on commercialization of new chips for autonomous driving solutions, the report adds. The company is supposedly on track to mass produce SoCs for Tesla’s Model 3 next year.
