What you’ll learn:
- Features of the R-Car X5H automotive system-on-chip family.
- How Renesas is taking advantage of chiplets.
The R-Car X5H family is a fifth-generation automotive system-on-chip (SoC) developed by Renesas that supports ASIL B/D capabilities as well as a neural processing unit (NPU). Built on the latest 3-nm chip technology, enhanced versions of the SoC come courtesy of chiplet technology. I talked with Cyril Clocher, Senior Director of the Automotive Product Line, about the details.
High-Performance Compute for Automotive Safety-Critical Apps
The basic R-Car X5H includes up to 32 Arm Cortex-720AE applications cores capable of delivering 1000K DMIPS of performance (Fig. 1). Real-time support is provided by half-a-dozen Arm Cortex-R52 cores with dual lockstep capability. These can deliver 60K DMIPS of performance while meeting ASIL B and ASIL D certification requirements.
There are general-purpose DSP cores, too, along with specialized accelerators such as the image signal processor (ISP) and dense-optical-flow (DOF) hardware accelerator (HWA) for handling multi-megapixel camera video streams.
The on-chip NPU can deliver up to 400 TOPS, while the on-chip GPU generates 4 TFLOPS of performance.
The chip includes an 8-port Ethernet switch, USB 2/3 ports, and PCI Express (PCIe) that supports Gen 4 and Gen 6. Also in the mix are an on-chip dedicated NPU and GPU. The GPU can drive a car’s display panel while the NPU handles artificial-intelligence and machine-learning (AI/ML) models.
Enhanced Automotive Chips Utilize UCIe
While the basic R-Car X5H monolithic chip is very impressive, it is designed to be enhanced using chiplets that employ Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) connectivity (Fig. 2). It can include up to two chiplets.
Renesas has two types of chiplets that can be included in enhanced versions of the R-Car SoC—again, an NPU and a GPU. These are designed to augment the functionality of the built-in NPU and GPU. The chiplet and on-chip NPU are able to run a separate set of AI/ML models. Likewise, the GPU can drive additional displays.
Building a Software-Defined Vehicle
The R-Car X5H family is destined for new automobiles including software-defined vehicles (SDVs). Thanks to the massive amount of computing power, the chip can handle everything from the advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) to driving automation.
Renesas’ R-Car Open Access (RoX) SDV platform helps get developers up to speed by simplifying their development chores (Fig. 3). It works with a variety of pre-integrated operating systems and frameworks, tying them into the Arm Cortex-A720AE and Cortex-R52 compute arrays. It utilizes open-source software and standard. APIs. Software built on the reference stacks can be turned into products.
