ON Semiconductor Corp. (NASDAQ:ON)

10% upside, Brian, SM pick

A leading supplier of advanced electronics for the automotive and industrial industries.

Among other things, it develops and sells the sensors and processors that are making today’s cars safer than ever before.
Its systems can warn you if there’s someone in your blind spot or if you’re drifting out of your lane.

Some can even take control of the car if necessary, helping you parallel park in tight spaces or even applying the brakes to avoid a collision.

A lot of these devices can take the human driver out of the equation, making them easily adaptable for autonomous cars.
In fact, at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it debuted a technology designed specifically for self-driving cars.
When you’re driving a car, you don’t just look at what’s right in front of you. You also keep an eye on things farther down the road for any upcoming hazards.

Up until now, autonomous car systems have had trouble doing the same thing.

Most rely on something called LiDAR, which stands for light detection and ranging. Much like radar uses radio waves to measure distances from targets, LiDAR uses laser light.
Right now, though, most of these sensors don’t work beyond two meters — which doesn’t help much when driving at high speeds.
It’s one reason why companies are having trouble adapting self-driving cars for highways.

But ON has developed a LiDAR that operates at short, middle and long ranges.

In other words, it can “see” better and farther than any other available system — giving it a very strong competitive edge in this market.

Of course, an autonomous car needs to know what to do with the information that it’s getting from the LiDAR.

So ON has partnered with Pony.ai, a leading autonomous driving tech company located in the heart of Silicon Valley.

The two will figure out the best way to capture and process the large amounts of sensor data.

It may even process more data at a faster rate than humans can — meaning autonomous cars will be able to outperform flesh-and-blood drivers.

Pony.ai is already working with Hyundai and Toyota on autonomous cars. So ON’s technology has a chance to prove itself with some very influential automobile manufacturers.
That puts ON at the forefront of an industry that is expected to grow 36.2% a year through 2020 — totaling $173 billion.
So it should be no surprise that front traders are all over this opportunity.