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8 Platform one June/July 2016 | Unmanned Systems Technology Driverless cars Road ahead for data fusion Chip suppliers are positioning themselves for the transition from advanced driver assist systems (ADAS) to fully autonomous driverless cars as the architecture of the vision systems changes (writes Nick Flaherty). “We are certainly in the early days of autonomous driving already, and we believe it’s a full progression from ADAS to full autonomous operation, not a separate category,” said Brooke Williams, business manager of the ADAS system-on-chip (SoC) business unit at Texas Instruments. TI has shipped more than 15 million SoC devices for front camera, surround view, radar systems and sensor fusion to 15 tier one suppliers that are selling to 25 car makers for 100 separate lines. “The building blocks are in there now, but to enable more advanced driving, fusion of that data needs to be done in a very intelligent way,” Williams said. “As things progress to autonomous operation there will need to be a higher level of data integration, and what we are already seeing is the centralisation of that edge signal processing, so we will see dumb sensors feeding raw image data into a central location. “When we start to see raw data movement, that’s when we need a lot more signal processing or a board with multiple SoCs. The beauty is that the architecture for image processing and control is heavily optimised for algorithms that run on the edge or in the middle. “For centralised control you need to have a very efficient architecture, so when we talk about front camera algorithms they are the most challenging. “You have to run six to ten algorithms on a single device, and that has to be in a very low power envelope of 2-4 W, and very few architectures can handle that level of processing at that power,” he said. While TI would not comment on the next generation devices for this, ST Microelectronics has extended its relationship with Israeli chip designer Mobileye for exactly this application. The two are working on the fifth- generation EyeQ5 SoC as the central computer for performing sensor fusion for fully autonomous driving vehicles. The chip will be designed in advanced 10 nm or below FinFET silicon technology with eight multi-threaded CPU cores coupled with 18 cores of Mobileye’s next- generation vision processors. This will provide eight times the performance of current devices, processing 12 Tflops with a power consumption of less than 5 W. Engineering samples of EyeQ5 are expected to be available by the first half of 2018, with development boards in the second half for running traditional computer vision but also neural network algorithms. “EyeQ5 is designed to serve as the central processor for future fully autonomous driving for both the sheer computing density – it can handle around 20 high-resolution sensors – and for increased functional safety,” said Prof Amnon Shashua, co- founder, CTO and chairman of Mobileye. “This continues the development Mobileye began in 2004 with EyeQ1, with optimised architectures to support intensive computations at power levels below 5 W to allow passive cooling in an automotive environment.” Mobileye is also adding a hardware security module to the chip so that system integrators can support over- the-air software updates and secure in-vehicle communications. Creating the root of trust is based on a secure boot from an encrypted storage device. The data interface is also vital, and EyeQ5 will support at least 40 Gbit/s through two PCIe Gen4 ports for inter- processor comms with other chips. The EyeQ5 SoC is designed to be the central processor for fully autonomous driving