Chips&Media WAVE6331X FuSa codec IP wins ISO 26262 ASIL-B certification

The KOSDAQ-listed multimedia IP vendor has secured automotive functional safety certification from DNV, targeting ADAS and in-vehicle infotainment markets.

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A robotic arm precisely holds a patterned silicon wafer in a brightly lit cleanroom with blurred industrial machinery in the background.

Chips&Media has announced that its WAVE6331X FuSa video codec hardware IP has received ISO 26262 ASIL-B certification from DNV, an independent third-party safety assessment body. The Seoul-based company said the milestone follows more than two years of dedicated R&D investment and positions the IP core for deployment in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) applications.

The certification covers functional safety design across multiple codec standards, including H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, AV1 and VP9. Chips&Media said it is preparing to extend the same safety framework to newer standards, including AV2 and Versatile Video Coding (VVC), though no timelines were given for those efforts.

What the certification covers

The WAVE6331X FuSa is designed to detect hardware faults and data corruption in video streams and transition the system to a defined safe state within a specified fault-response window. The company says internal safety mechanisms, including real-time CRC protection and instruction-flow monitoring, are baked into the IP architecture to minimise additional chip area and power consumption, a recurring concern for SoC designers working within tight automotive thermal and silicon-area budgets.

The product ships as a Safety Element out of Context (SEooC), a pre-certified package that includes a Safety Manual. Chips&Media says this is intended to reduce the integration and verification burden on tier-1 suppliers and chipmakers, who would otherwise need to perform extensive block-level safety analysis independently before OEM submission.

Chief executive Steve Kim stated that the IP is already adopted by three of the world's top five automotive chipmakers, though no customer names were disclosed. Kim described the certification as marking "our official evolution from a multimedia IP provider into a global automotive safety leader," a claim the company positioned as reflecting the scope of the functional safety work rather than market leadership by revenue or shipment volume.

Market context and competitive positioning

The automotive semiconductor market is under significant pressure to demonstrate functional safety compliance as vehicle autonomy levels increase. ISO 26262 certification has become a de facto entry requirement for suppliers targeting premium OEM programmes, and the ASIL hierarchy (from A to D, with D being the most stringent) shapes procurement decisions at every tier of the supply chain. ASIL-B is appropriate for systems where a failure could cause injury but not the most severe life-threatening outcomes, making it a realistic target for video processing subsystems that support, rather than directly control, vehicle dynamics.

Chips&Media competes in the video codec IP space against a small number of specialist licensors as well as in-house IP development teams at larger semiconductor groups. The decision to certify its codec IP as an SEooC, rather than as a component requiring customer-led safety analysis from scratch, is a commercially meaningful differentiator: it shifts a portion of the safety-case workload onto the IP vendor and can materially shorten time-to-market for SoC customers under OEM deadline pressure.

The robotics market, also cited as a target by Chips&Media, is less mature in its adoption of ISO 26262, which is an automotive-specific standard. Functional safety in robotics is more commonly framed around IEC 62061 or ISO 13849. Whether automotive-grade certification carries direct purchasing weight in robotics procurement is a question the company has not addressed in this announcement.

Outlook

Chips&Media said it intends to expand beyond multimedia IP into a broader role in the autonomous driving ecosystem. The company has not disclosed revenue attributable to automotive customers, the commercial terms of its existing tier-1 relationships, or the price or licensing model for the WAVE6331X FuSa package. Investors and prospective customers will look to those details, alongside named design wins, as indicators of how quickly the automotive revenue line can scale from what remains a mobile and consumer compute base.

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