THE country’s aspiration to deploy 30 million autonomous vehicles within a decade is seeding a fledgling chip industry, with startups like Horizon Robotics Inc. emerging to build the brains behind those wheels.

The Beijing-based company is taking aim at Nvidia Corp. and Mobileye NV just as the autonomous driving business takes off and uncertainty looms over international trade. Annual revenue from the chips used in driverless vehicles globally should more than double to US$5 billion by 2021, according to Gartner Inc.

Horizon Robotics is an example of China’s resolve to move up the manufacturing value chain by focusing less on commodity smartphones and TVs, and more on sophisticated semiconductors and artificial intelligence that can help cars drive themselves or spaceships land on the moon. That industrial policy is meant to help China reduce its 1.75 trillion yuan (US$276.4 billion) in annual chip imports, a value dwarfing its oil imports.

“China has to spare no efforts to pick up and develop its own chip technology to improve our own sense of security, especially when the U.S. Government is making us fearful about any protectionism against China,” Wei Shaojun, director of the Beijing-based Institute of Microelectronics at Tsinghua University, said at a forum in Shanghai.

China’s push for self-reliance is a priority for the Central Government, which set up a 200-billion-yuan fund for investments in homegrown chipmakers.

Overseers of the world’s largest car market — and electric vehicle market — want to put Chinese-developed chips under those hoods and behind those dashboards. The government expects to have a manufacturing industry for parts such as sensors and embedded chips with a production value exceeding 100 billion yuan by 2020.

“Everyone is on the same starting line, thus creating an opportunity for China,” said Ding Wenwu, president of the State-owned China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund Co.

Horizon Robotics was founded in 2015 by Yu Kai, the former head of Baidu Inc.’s artificial intelligence business called the Institute of Deep Learning.

Horizon’s smaller-than-a-postage-stamp circuit board is called “Journey 1.0.”

The processor can detect as many as 200 targets — including pedestrians, vehicles and lane markings — in real time, thereby helping the driverless cars avoid collisions.(SD-Agencies)