Google has been a pioneer in the incipient field of self-driving cars.The innovation for that carswill not only push the breaking points of artificial intelligence and machine vision software, they will also push semiconductor chip technology and hardware systems.

Daniel Rosenband, the hardware engineer in self-driving cars division at Google, spilled the beans in a keynote speech this week at the Hot Chips chip conference in Cupertino, Calif.The discussion was one of the numerous that demonstrated that the outskirts for sophisticated semiconductors - the foundation for everything electronic - is no longer being controlled by PCs and cell phones.

Rather, it's the chips that can help cars perform the artificial intelligence calculations that control driving, and the machine vision software that helps cars recognize walkers or bikers.Google is only one of numerous companies that could drive the $330 billion chip industry on a whole new level.

Other companies working on self-driving cars include Tesla, Honda, BMW, Volvo, Mercedes, and Ford.Uber confirmed that it would begin testing 100 self-driving on-demand cars in Pittsburgh.

General Motors and ride-sharing company Lyft said it would begin testing self-driving taxis by the end of the year.At some point, Google might very well need systems that are the equivalent of data centers on a mobile device. It has to deliver the maximum amount of computing performance without consuming too much power, Rosenband said.

And it has to enable a car to tap computing resources in data centers.Why? Google has driven 2 million miles with its self-driving cars, but it still can't expect everything that happens in the world.

Chris Rowan, a chip master and an executive at Cadence Design Systems, proposed that Google may need to test drive for a billion miles to handle all of the bizarre events that could happen.

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