Safest and smartest ever motoring as Arm drives Autonomous Vehicle tech revolution
Along with its global army of ecosystem partners, Arm is bringing to market the safest and smartest, most technology-rammed vehicles ever witnessed on the world’s highways.
The multi-billion dollar investment all started in Cambridge soon after the company’s launch in 1990. And it is streets ahead of a silicon highway.
Dipti Vachani, SVP & GM of Automotive at Arm, told Business Weekly: “A significant portion of the automotive engineering team is based in Cambridge and as our global headquarters it continues to be a major hub for innovation.”
Vachani hosted a virtual group pre-briefing including Business Weekly to share the feast of innovation.
Now we are able to reveal that Arm and ecosystem partners – all world leaders in their own specialist fields – have wheeled out leading-edge compute and software platforms, delivered together for the first time and designed to dramatically accelerate automotive development and improve time to market. Vachani said the initiative could shave as much as two years off that timeline – and ahead of silicon being available.
More specifically, Arm and its ecosystem are making virtual platforms and software solutions available on day one alongside the latest generation of Arm Automotive Enhanced (AE) technology to enable earlier, faster, flexible, and more agile software development.
The company has also provided a glimpse under the hood – revealing a tantalising glimpse of future plans for enabling its automotive partner ecosystem to move even faster, and achieve better TCO. It will surprise no-one, given Arm’s pedigree, that the company’s AI competency will feature large in the strategy.
Vachani said the new safety-enabled AE processors would bring leading-edge Armv9 and server-class performance to AI-driven use cases, adding that future Arm Compute Subsystems (CSS) for automotive would further reduce development time and cost, providing maximum flexibility for high-performance automotive systems.
She said that, for the first time, the Arm ecosystem can develop software on virtual prototyping solutions for the automotive market ahead of physical silicon being available, accelerating development cycles by up to two years.
Vachani said: “The automotive market is going through an unprecedented transformation with demand for more autonomy, increasingly advanced user experiences and the trend toward electrification creating an explosion of software and AI.
“Vehicle electronics are becoming more complex and to deliver at pace, a fundamental rethink of product development is needed. Today, in a series of industry firsts, Arm and our ecosystem are unveiling the latest Arm Automotive Enhanced (AE) processors alongside new virtual platforms, all made available to the industry from day one to accelerate automotive development cycles by up to two years.
“For the first time, we are bringing Armv9-based technologies to automotive, enabling the industry to take advantage of the AI, security and virtualisation capabilities that this latest generation of the Arm architecture delivers.
“To meet the growing performance demands of today’s vehicles, we are leveraging our leadership in the infrastructure market by bringing server-class Neoverse technology to automotive, along with new Armv9-based Cortex-A products for scalability.”
The full line-up of products announced today includes:
• Arm Neoverse V3AE: Bringing Neoverse technology to the automotive sector for the first time, delivering server-class performance for AI-accelerated autonomous and ADAS workloads
• Arm’s first v9-based Cortex-A processors purpose-built for automotive:
– Arm Cortex-A720AE: Delivering industry-leading sustained performance with SoC design flexibility for a broad range of software-defined vehicle (SDV) applications
– Arm Cortex-A520AE: Providing leading power efficiency with functional safety features to scale across automotive use cases
• Arm Cortex-R82AE: The highest-ever performing real-time processor for functional safety which delivers 64-bit computing to real-time processing for the very first time
• Arm Mali-C720AE: A configurable ISP optimized for the most demanding computer and human vision use cases
• A range of configurable system IP to enable the Arm silicon ecosystem to deliver scalable, high-performance automotive SoCs
This new technology is already being adopted by leading players, including Marvell, MediaTek, NVIDIA, NXP, Renesas, Telechips, Texas Instruments, and others.
The road ahead: Arm Compute Subsystems for Automotive
Vachani says there is lots more to come. “We are not stopping there. Looking ahead, we see that systems are only going to get more complex, the need for safety will become even greater and we’ll need to bring all of these compute components together for our partners, standardising for consistency where it matters.
“Arm CSS for Automotive will deliver pre-integrated and validated configurations of Arm AE IP optimised for performance, power, and area using a leading-edge foundry process. Our first CSS for automotive is expected to be delivered in 2025.
“Traditional automotive development cycles are linear: First processor IP is delivered, then silicon development begins, and only when hardware becomes available around two years later, can software developers start.
‘Today we’re changing that with a new approach: virtual prototyping on industry-leading, latest-generation Arm AE IP, which allows software developers to start before the physical silicon is available.
“We’re partnering with industry leaders including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cadence, Corellium, Siemens and others to deliver these virtual platforms and cloud solutions, which allow for earlier, more seamless development across the full software stack in collaboration with partners including Autoware Foundation, BlackBerry QNX, Elektrobit, Kernkonzept, LeddarTech, Mapbox, Sensory, Tata Technologies, TIER IV, Vector and more.
“Today’s announcement marks a critical step in enabling the automotive ecosystem by unlocking new opportunities for developers and accelerating time to market for leading OEMs, automotive Tier 1 suppliers, silicon partners, and software providers that are all building the future of software-defined vehicles on Arm.”
