Artificial Intelligence

Automotive processors enable safer driving experience

22nd December 2016
Daisy Stapley-Bunten
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Extending its leadership in the automotive market, Texas Instruments (TI) has announced more than 150 million of its advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and digital cockpit Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) are on the road today, in more than 35 OEMs. Leveraging 35 years of automotive experience and billions of analogue and embedded processing solutions shipped to automotive manufacturers worldwide, TI created both the TDA and “Jacinto” families of processors to enable designers to deliver applications that are safer and more connected.

TI’s automotive processors are able to deliver automotive manufacturers what they need to design the next gen of vehicles that consumers not only want to drive, but with the features they demand. These needs include new applications at an optimised total cost of ownership and with features that are more interactive and responsive than previous vehicles.

Automotive manufacturers benefit from TI’s heterogeneous architecture with increased functionality and capability to innovate on the same platform by leveraging installed hardware components and allowing manufacturers to extend current software investment without compromising system performance. This architecture allows for increased concurrencies allowing designers to further extend image, signal and vision processing capabilities. Additionally, TI’s automotive processors provide greater power efficiency than other solutions, using general purpose processors and facilitate multi-OS and multi-domain software architecture. Lastly, it offers scalability which maximize investments across multiple models, systems and applications to easily differentiate their offering.

ADAS: a safer driving experience
TI's TDAx driver assistance SoC family offers scalable and open solutions based on a common hardware and software architecture for ADAS applications, including camera-based front (mono/stereo), rear, surround view and night vision systems, and multi-range radar and sensor fusion systems. TI’s TDAx SoCs are differentiated by a heterogeneous architecture which integrates purpose-built hardware accelerators (HWA) such as image signal processors (ISPs), embedded vision engines (EVEs) and digital signal processors (DSPs), that are optimized to perform highly complex imaging and signal processing with low power consumption. The members of the TDA family of ADAS processors are:

  • The TDA3 designed for “entry to mid” performance for broad ADAS applications including front camera, surround view including 3-D without GPU, smart rear camera, radar, camera mirror replacement/eMirror, driver monitoring and Lidar.
  • TDA2 Eco intended for “mid” performance targeting 3-D surround view with GPU, for both Ethernet and LVDS networks.
  • The TDA2 targeted for “mid to premium” performance for broad ADAS & HAV applications including front camera, surround view with GPU and fusion/centralised processing.

The award-winning TDA family has also been awarded various awards from Frost & Sullivan industry firm, the Consumers Electronics Show (CES) and Electronic Products magazine.

Digital Cockpit: a more connected driving experience
The “Jacinto” family of processors provides support for a variety of automotive digital cockpit applications including infotainment, head unit co-processing for infotainment, informational ADAS, integrated digital cockpit, digital instrument cluster, head-up display and more. Designed for automotive safety and robustness, “Jacinto” heterogeneous architecture includes hardware firewalls, allows separation between High Level OS (HLOS) and safety OS as well as implementation of robust multi-domain software architecture capable to be ASIL-B safety certified. The processors bring unprecedented feature-rich, in-vehicle infotainment, instrument cluster and telematics features to the next generation of automobiles.

The scalability of the “Jacinto” family allows developers to target specific performance for their applications and leverage headroom using higher performance variants, if required, without software modifications or hardware changes. The "Jacinto 6" family of processors is built on the same architecture, offering software and hardware compatibility with the broadest array of highly scalable ARM Cortex-A15 cores for automotive applications.The members of the "Jacinto 6" family of infotainment processors include:

  • The DRA71x, “Jacinto 6 Entry” is an entry-level infotainment processor for display audio, radio/audio and other cost-sensitive in-vehicle automotive cockpit applications.
  • The DRA72x, "Jacinto 6 Eco" delivers feature-rich infotainment, digital cluster and telematics features for entry- to mid-level vehicles.
  • The DRA74x "Jacinto 6" is intended for mainstream in-vehicle infotainment applications and head-units.
  • Both DRA75x processors, "Jacinto 6 EP" and "Jacinto 6 Ex", have extended DSP and vision processing performance to enhance digital cockpit integration.

The “Jacinto” family of processors is powering infotainment systems such as Ford SYNC 3, Volkswagen MIB-II, SAIC-Alibaba “Internet Car” and BMW.

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