Athos Silicon, Mercedes' Self-Driving Safety-Chip Spinoff, Dissolves

Athos Silicon, a startup that spun out of Mercedes-Benz to build redundant, multi-chiplet processors for the safety systems of self-driving cars, has ceased operations after its board voted to wind the company down. Former CEO Charnjiv Bangar confirmed the dissolution to EE Times, attributing the decision to the company's inability to close its next round on terms its cap table would accept.

Athos spent five years inside Mercedes before spinning out with strategic investment and a substantial IP license from the automaker. Its architecture paired small, modular chip tiles called chiplets, with a patented voting mechanism that lets one tile monitor its neighbors for faults and migrate workloads before a failure interrupts service. That approach to "functional safety," the engineering discipline of keeping vehicle electronics working correctly even when hardware fails, was consistently well received by the technical community and prospective partners, Bangar told EE Times, even as the funding position eroded.

The roadmap had already been redrawn after Arm's acquisition of DreamBig, whose chiplet hub anchored Athos's original multi-vendor plan. The revised plan called for taping out Athos's own SoC chiplet on organic substrate, with a single-chiplet variant aimed at smaller autonomous systems such as drones.

Under the wind-down, the IP Athos originally licensed from Mercedes reverts to Mercedes; IP developed after the spinout stays with its inventors. What Mercedes does with that reverted safety architecture is now an open question.