(iTers News) - Intel has signed a deal to acquire Mobileye, the worlds’ largest automotive vision image processor chip maker, for US$15.3 billion in cash, or US$63.45 per share, a 34% premium over the closing share price as of last Friday.

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Both of the two chipmakers’ complementary chip portfolios was a good for the acquisition, as the tie will likely create a win-win synergy effect in their drive to establish a head start in rapidly growing self-driving cars.

The acquisition also represent Intel’s hefty bet to diversify its business line into automotive market, as cars are rapidly evolving into moving robots.

Intel has a rich product portfolio from microprocessors for PCs and servers to cellular modem chips.

Mobileye is Israel-based fabless chip maker that has so far shipped over 15 million units of vision processor chips to power global car makers’ ADAS, or advanced driving assistant system.

All combined, their chip portfolio are not only complementing each other, but also key building blocks for self-driving cars. For example, Mobileye’s vision processor chips will gather huge data on road information across the world. Intel’s CPUs and modem chips will transmit and process them in real time across a constellation of cloud-based data centers

Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO said, “Intel provides critical foundational technologies for autonomous driving including plotting the car’s path and making real-time driving decisions. Mobileye brings the industry’s best automotive-grade computer vision and strong momentum with automakers and suppliers. Together, we can accelerate the future of autonomous driving with improved performance in a cloud-to-car solution at a lower cost for automakers.”

“We expect the growth towards autonomous driving to be transformative. It will provide consumers with safer, more flexible, and less costly transportation options, and provide incremental business model opportunities for our automaker customers,” said Mr. Ziv Aviram, Mobileye Co-Founder, President and CEO.

“By pooling together our infrastructure and resources, we can enhance and accelerate our combined know-how in the areas of mapping, virtual driving, simulators, development tool chains, hardware, data centers and high-performance computing platforms. Together, we will provide an attractive value proposition for the automotive industry.”

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The best-in-class technologies from two companies- spanning connectivity, computer vision, data center, sensor fusion, high-performance computing, localization and mapping, machine learning and artificial intelligence- will be key ingredients in developing better solutions for partially or fully connected and autonomous cars, which are increasingly becoming data centers on wheels.

Intel expects that by 2020, autonomous vehicles will generate 4,000 GB of data per day.

The company estimates the vehicle systems, data and services market will reach up to $70 billion by 2030.

The combined global autonomous driving organization will be headquartered in Israel and led by Professor Amnon Shashua, Mobileye’s Co-Founder, Chairman and CTO.

The organization will support both companies’ existing production programs and build upon relationships with automotive OEMs, Tier-1 suppliers and semiconductor partners to develop advanced driving assist, highly autonomous and fully autonomous driving programs.

Intel Senior Vice President Doug Davis will oversee the combined organization’s engagement across Intel’s business groups and will report to Prof. Amnon Shashua after the transaction’s closing.

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