Exclusive |‘India is a land of opportunity, with a lot of fast growth’: Mike Chang, MediaTek Corporate Vice President

MediaTek, the Taiwanese semiconductor giant, recently announced its partnership with Reliance Jio to supply the growing electric scooter market with digital dashboard. In an exclusive conversation with Business Today’s Technology editor Aayush Ailawadi, Mike Chang, MediaTek Corporate Vice President talked about the importance of Indian market for the company. 

He said, “India is a land of opportunity, with a lot of fast growth. MediaTek has many successful products in consumer mobile phones, TVs, and streaming devices. We're also doing well in the automotive sector.” He also emphasised that now that MediaTek is entering the automotive market, it will focus on offering good hardware and software scalability, which are crucial for the industry. 

Talking about the safety aspects of the partnership, he stated, “Safety is the number one priority in automotive. You want to drive safely, so we have a lot of experts analyzing failure situations and how to respond to them. We comply with the ISO 26262 standard [an international standard for functional safety in the automotive industry], applying all the safety requirements to our products. Our products are also AEC-Q100 automotive-grade, meaning they are reliable and safe.”

Where is MediaTek heading when it comes to artificial intelligence? To this, he responded, “Over the past ten years, we've seen advancements from basic models to transformer-based models like ChatGPT, which are improving. Our products aim to leverage the best large language models and applications rapidly. NVIDIA's ecosystem is one of the best, and we collaborate with them in our cars to use their ecosystem and GPU flexibility for novel, innovative user experiences.”

When asked if MediaTek is open to the idea of ChatGPT integration with future projects just like some automotive companies, like Volkswagen, he explained, “Open source can take time to establish. People envision software portability across OEM vendors, which is a great idea. However, OEMs want to create unique differentiations. The future might see a balance between open systems and proprietary differentiation. Some areas will likely be open source, while others remain proprietary.”

Chang also talked about India’s growth when it comes to driverless cars and full automation. He said, “Transitioning from L1 to L2 involves highway navigation, while urban environments are more complex due to road variations, signage, and conditions. Predicting and handling corner cases—rare but critical situations—requires extensive data training in the cloud rather than real-world testing. Cloud data centers will train the software for these corner cases. Autonomous driving is a dream coming true, with future visions of all moving machines being autonomous.”