Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) yesterday conducted a 5G spectrum-based field trial for autonomous vehicles at a lab in New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋) to demonstrate vehicle-to-infrastructure technology developed by a subsidiary.
The company expects to provide more autonomous vehicle tests and trials using 5G networks at its lab in the future.
“Our aim is to help grow this 5G value chain ranging from chips and small cell stations to all kinds of applications,” Chunghwa Telecom chairman Sheih Chi-mau (謝繼茂) told reporters on the sidelines of the field trial.
Photo: Lai Hsiao-tung, Taipei Times
The company focuses on the delivery of real-time information, such as traffic data to vehicles using high-speed and low-latency 5G technology, while Kingwaytek Technology Co (勤崴), a 26 percent held subsidiary, is helping to develop autonomous driving systems, particularly for shuttle buses, Sheih said.
Kingwaytek is a supplier of high-definition (HD) electronic maps and vehicle navigation systems.
“We are developing a decisionmaking system for self-driving vehicles and a traffic prediction system, which will be combined with our HD electronic maps to complete our self-driving solution,” Kingwaytek chairman Alfred Ko (柯應鴻) said.
Kingwaytek plans to conduct a series of self-driving field trials next year in collaboration with Automotive Research and Testing Center (車輛研究測試中心) via a sandbox program in Changhua County, Ko said.
The trial, if successful, would pave the way for the company to sell its self-driving solutions overseas in the next two to three years, injecting new revenue growth momentum into the business, he said.
Southeast Asian nations would be ideal markets, as Chunghwa Telecom’s strength in the region could provide leverage, he said.
Kingwaytek operates one autonomous vehicle trial field in Changhua County and another in Taoyuan’s Hutoushan (虎頭山).
Yesterday, Chunghwa Telecom and Taiwan Mobile Co (台灣大哥大) both said separately that they have submitted their applications to bid for 5G bandwidth and are prepared to substantially invest in 5G network deployment.
Asked if Taiwan Mobile still aims to secure 100 megahertz of bandwidth at the auction, Taiwan Mobile president Jamie Lin (林之晨) said: “Only for a reasonable price.”
“Taiwan Mobile will make 5G [services] available in the second half of next year,” Lin said.
The telecom is in talks with multiple agencies about launching 5G trial fields, he said, adding that the company has one trial field in the baseball stadium in New Taipei City’s Sinjhuang District (新莊).
UNCONVINCING: The US Congress questioned whether the company’s Chinese owners pose a national security risk and how the app might influence young users TikTok chief executive officer Shou Chew (周受資), confronted with an unforgiving, distrustful US Congress, tried to give answers in his testimony on Thursday that avoided offending either the US government or China. However, his evasiveness left Congress unsatisfied, with representatives hungrier than ever to punish TikTok for ties to its parent company ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動), based in Beijing. He did not bring his company any closer to a resolution. Politically, TikTok is in a tougher spot. Its executives had been discussing divesting from ByteDance to resolve US national security concerns, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. However, China this week said
The Investment Commission yesterday approved a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) application to invest an additional US$3.5 billion in its Arizona subsidiary to manufactured advanced chips. The world’s largest contract chipmaker’s board of directors last month approved the funding project after TSMC started moving manufacturing equipment into the fab in December last year in preparation for the production of 4-nanometer chips next year. TSMC said it has also commenced the second phase of facility construction in Arizona. The second fab is to produce semiconductors using 3-nanometer technology in 2026. Altogether, TSMC plans to spend US$40 billion on the Arizona fabs, doubling its
KEY SECTOR: Taiwan’s new chip legislation is insufficient, and a more strategic ‘chip act’ that covers the whole semiconductor ecosystem is needed, MediaTek’s chairman said MediaTek Inc (聯發科) chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) yesterday urged the government to formulate a state semiconductor strategy and comprehensive “chip act” that includes local chip designers and smaller-scale semiconductor companies, as they are facing intensifying competition from China. The government is playing an increasingly important role in safeguarding the local semiconductor industry’s competitiveness, given that the US, the EU and Japan are offering hefty subsidies and significant tax incentives to build semiconductor capacity domestically, as they have realized the strategic importance of semiconductors, Tsai said. To implement such a program, the government should take steps to finance a “chip act,” Tsai said
Microsoft Corp has threatened to cut off access to its Internet search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they do not stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence (AI) chat products, people familiar with the dispute have said. The software maker licenses the data in its Bing search index — a map of the Internet that can be quickly scanned in real time — to other companies that offer Web search, such as Apollo Global Management Inc’s Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Last month, Microsoft integrated a cousin of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chat technology, into Bing. Rivals
RSS