Fully autonomous cars will drive to the market by 2022, carrying a $10,000 price premium. Their arrival will help double by 2025 the size of today’s $10 billion automotive semiconductor market, fueling new segments like vision processors.

That’s one of the conclusions analyst Linley Gwennap draws in preparation his annual Linley Processor Conference next week. Cadence aims to ride the trend with a new vision DSP its former Tensilica group will describe at the event.

Among other expected news items at the conference:

• Startup Soft Machines will describe its first CPU core and SoC platform
• The HSA Foundation will reveal adopters of its heterogeneous SoC specifications
• MoSys will disclose a third-generation Bandwidth Engine
• Arteris and Synopsys will introduce new memory interfaces
• NetSpeed will describe a tool for designers of coherent systems
• And Marvell may provide an update on it MoChi SoC initiative

This year’s event is the first to shine a light on the growing market for automotive chips, thanks to the rise of self-driving cars.

“I’ve talked to several people working in the field, and the general agreement is the technology [for self-driving cars] is there and being tested,” said Gwennap, principal of the Linley Group (Mountain View, Calif.), noting car makers are already working on 2018-2020 model cars given their long design cycles.

Today’s cars already have lane detection, that’s a fundamental capability you need to keep the car on the road. Adaptive cruise control and features to maintain a safe driving distance are being tested — those are two other main pieces for highway driving.

Companies such as Mobileye have solved a lot of the complex urban driving problems. But there are still a lot of corner cases R&D has to deal with. People talk about wanting to take over driving in a time of emergency, but that’s the time you don’t want to take over because a [self-driving] car is most likely going to deal with an emergency better than a person.”