Freescale has partnered with software companies Neusoft and Green Hills Software to help develop an ecosystem around Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS).
The ADAS is intended to speed up and simplify the introduction of vision-based automotive applications ‘ a key aspect of driverless cars and improved safety mechanisms. Given its existing strength in automotive chips, these are areas where Freescale will be keen to establish a power base in order to remain competitive in future technology generations.
The new partnership’s ADAS incorporates the Integrity operating system from Green Hills, ‘silicon-aware’ vision software from Neusoft, and Freescale’s APEX-642 Image Cognition Processing (ICP) chip, which it licensed from CogniVue in 2012.
This partnership epitomizes Freescale’s focus on preparing for a more software-defined world. The importance of image processing and vision-based systems is not lost on the US firm, which is already firmly embedded in the M2M and automotive markets. It aims to use its new alliance to lay the groundwork for a platform that combines the functionality of the currently separate strands of ADAS products, such as navigation and emergency braking, into a more complete OEM offering.
ADAS systems designed to improve the safety record of a vehicle and cut the accident rate are already slowly coming to market. A computer can react to a dangerous situation far more quickly than a human driver, meaning that more time is available for braking or steering out of harm’s way.
Aside from emergency braking, other ADAS applications include adaptive cruise control, blind-spot monitoring, lane departure warning, night vision systems, and collision warning. These systems can improve the safety of orthodox cars while paving the way for fully autonomous vehicles.
Of course, such systems are dependent on a computer being able to interpret the world around it accurately, and as such, they are entirely software dependent, hence the need for companies like Freescale to seek out partners.
The Integrity real time OS is built around a partitioning architecture to provide embedded systems with enhanced reliability and security, to comply with the requirements of the ISO 26262 safety standard. It uses hardware memory protection to protect the embedded code, and guaranteed system resources to prevent CPU crashes.
The APEX-642 processor ‘enables extraction of application-specific information from a scene and interprets the image data to make decisions or take actions based on the data.’ The chip claims to be a hundred times more efficient in performance per area per power than conventional processor architectures. It was designed to handle embedded image and vision processing algorithms efficiently, initially for rear-view cameras, which entailed the focus on lower power consumption and low memory requirement.
The APEX-642 derives its name from the 64 computational units contained in two array processor units, each a parallel processing engine that can switch seamlessly between scalar and vector processing.
Freescale currently offer a number of ADAS products, including an Ethernet rear view camera and a smart version that analyzes the image and can judge distances to intervene in driver behavior; as well as a front-facing smart camera, multi-camera surround-view parking assistance, and a 77-79GHz radar system and chipset.
Simulator-based evaluation platforms are available to developers and OEMs today and the partnership expects the platform to be available in the first half of 2015. Freescale thinks the platform will appear in commercial vehicles in 2017.