New-Tech Europe | May 2017

Cadence presented a lot of information about the OpenVX standard, and how it has complete support on the Tensilica Vision P5 and P6 cores. See my earlier post See Further by Standing on the Shoulders of...OpenVX. Linley also had some information on specific automotive processors: Mobileye EyeQ3 dominates ADAS vision processors today. EyeQ4 rated at 2 trillion operations per second (TOPS) at just 3W. EyeQ5 expected to sample in 2018 with production in 2020, delivering 12 TOPS at 3W. One interesting wrinkle, that Linley didn't mention, is the EyeQx designs are MIPS-based (I don't think Intel was a MIPS licensee and the future of MIPS is unclear with Apple moving away from Imagination GPUs). NVIDIA is developing a single-chip solution of their DRIVEPX2 called Xavier that combines 8 custom CPUs, 512-shader Volta GPU delivering >3TFLOPS, new integer only 30 TOPS vision processor, and a 30W power budget (sampling late this year and could be in 2020 cars). NXP has a reference design called BlueBox with a vision-processing chip and an 8-core A-57 and a 40W power budget. Qualcomm is expected to boost R&D in this area. I covered BlueBox in passing in the DVCon Europe keynote. Renasas has a new automotive platform called Autonomy, although Linley didn't mention it. That's because it was announced between the conference and me writing this post, that's how fast things are moving. Lexus Lane Valet It's way past April 1, so a bit late for a prank video, but Lexus came up with a new feature for advanced driver automation, with its lane valet:

the timescales for introduction: Level 3 vehicles to debut this year in high-end ($50K+) vehicles and in trucks Level 3 BOM cost will drop below $5K by 2022, and market may be lubricated by reduction in insurance cost Level 4 vehicles in 2022 in high- end brands and commercial vehicles (taxis/uber) True level 5 may take 10 years to develop I think that everything may happen faster than this, since progress is being made so fast. It is not much more than a decade ago that autonomous vehicles couldn't go ten miles and required so much electronics that they required extra air conditioners on the roof. Deep learning has only become dominant in the last five years, perhaps fewer. Fully autonomous trucks have been in use in open cast mining for some years. Planes can land themselves, although the automotive people all claim that there are several orders of magnitude more code in a high-end car than a plane. That may be true, but there is also probably a reason we let 15 years olds behind the wheel of a car but not a 777.

earth-shattering announcement, but instead that it was really a bit boring. It was boring because everyone said the same thing. That in itself is a story. The future is going to be cars with lots of sensors (lots of cameras, because they are cheap, some radar, some lidar) and high-performance chips that perform the sensor fusion, do the vision recognition, and handle the policy aspects of driving. A decade ago, every presentation in EDA opened with a graph illustrating the design gap, before going on to show how whatever product was being presented would close it. Today, every automotive presentation opens with a picture showing the complexity of future automotive electronics. Here are a selection from the day: Linley's opening keynote gave a good high-level overview of the space. He started off talking about how autonomous technology drives many markets such as planes and drones. But really it is all about cars (and trucks, but they are mostly just big cars). He covered a lot of the basics, such as SAE autonomous mode levels, that I have covered in numerous posts here already. Since Linley Group talks to a lot more people than I do, it is interesting to see what he considers

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