Where Are We with Autonomous Vehicles?

Feb. 13, 2023

Arm's Robert Day provides insights into what the company is doing to support autonomous vehicles as well as the challenges faced by developers.

Robert Day,

William G. Wong

Related To: Electronic Design

This video is part of TechXchange Talks.

SAE Level 4 and Level 5 autonomous vehicles require significant amounts of computing power to support the necessary advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) capabilities. Arm is providing IP that addresses these capabilities. I talked with Arm's Director of Automotive Partnerships, Robert Day, about what the company is doing in this space (see video above).

Arm provides a range of processor and accelerator designs that are incorporated into system-on-chip (SoC) solutions, which chip vendors are delivering to Tier 1 and OEMs to power ADAS in today's vehicles. One example is NXP's S32G network SoC family that supports communication in a domain-centric vehicle (see figure). Multiple Arm Cortex-M and Cortex-A processor cores are incorporated in the chip, including many that are configured in lockstep with other cores to provide the level of reliability and safety needed for automotive applications.

1. The NXP S32G family is the networking component of the company's automotive line of SoCs. It includes lockstep real-time Cortex-M7 and application-oriented Cortex-A53 cores.

Building automotive-grade components isn't easy, and incorporating the range of processors and accelerators into a single chip can be a challenge, but they're essential for autonomous vehicles. This means including CPUs, GPUs, and machine learning into chips that can meet automotive standards. It also means that partnerships are needed, since one company simply can't provide all of the expertise needed to deliver a workable solution.

Safety-Aware Chips Serve Autonomous-Driving Apps

Links

About the Author

Robert Day | Director of Autonomous Vehicles, Arm

Based in San Jose, Calif., Robert Day is the director of autonomous vehicles at Arm, responsible for the definition of Arm-based solutions for the next generation of autonomous vehicle applications.

In this role, Robert is dedicated to understanding the requirements for future autonomous innovation and helping put together solutions and platforms to meet those requirements. By immersing himself in the autonomous-vehicle world, he has accumulated a wealth of knowledge around the technology, issues and potential solutions that will make self-driving vehicles a reality.

His passion for the safe deployment of autonomous vehicles has made him a popular speaker at automotive conferences worldwide, and even hosted a panel of autonomous experts at Arm’s own TechCon conference where the reality of true autonomous vehicles was hotly debated.

Prior to Arm, Robert was VP of Marketing at Lynx Software Technologies, where he was responsible for the Lynx portfolio of safety and security solutions, focusing on avionics and automotive applications. Robert started his career as a SCADA engineer, and later wrote processor simulators for the popular XRAY debugger with Mentor Graphics. Robert has a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Brighton, UK.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.