Behind all the excitement of cars driving themselves down the freeway to Las Vegas for CES this week is a jockeying for position for semiconductor vendors and processor architectures.

Audi demonstrated a prototype A7 driving unassisted from San Francisco, a distance of 550 miles, using radar sensors for long-range and 360 degree views, as well as LIDAR laser scanners at the front and back. It also used a new high-resolution 3D video camera to take a wide-angle view out of the front, combining the data from four other cameras around the car.

All of this data is managed by the advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) that are the beachhead for chip makers on their roadmaps to self-driving cars. ADASes are initially providing functions such as lane departure warning, advanced cruise control, traffic sign recognition, pedestrian and object detection, forward collision warning and reversing prevention, but these are all key algorithms for the self-driving car. Indeed, these emerging devices already support autonomous emergency braking, and are also being designed for the ISO26262 automotive safety standard.

Israeli chip designer Mobileye saw a billion dollar IPO on the NASDAQ stockmarket last year as a result of this drive, moving from 160 customers by the end of 2014 to 237 by 2017. Along with foundry partner ST Microelectronics it intends to be a key element in self-driving cars that are on the market in 2022. Its EyeQ family of vision processors is based on the MIPS architecture, and the company signed up with new owner Imagination Technologies following the takeover in 2013 to use the Aptiv and Warrior processor families that follow on from the MIPS34K in the EyeQ2 processor in 2008 and 1004K in the EyeQ3 in 2012. It was the lead partner for the definition of the M51xx family of cores with hardware virtualization that will sit at the heart of the next generation devices for customers such as General Motors, Volvo and Honda.