More and more ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System) functions have been added to the current car driving system，which let the driver have more mastery of the driving process and the environment of the car, ensure the safety of driving. This article will introduce you the development trend of ADAS and related solutions.
Driver's Best Assistant
ADAS collects data by various sensors installed on vehicle and makes systematic calculation with map data, so as to pre-judge the possible dangers for drivers and ensure the safety of driving. First of all, we need to clarify a concept that ADAS is different from auto-driving that is very popular now; the research focus of the two are totally different. ADAS is assisted driving, its core is environmental awareness, while auto-driving is artificial intelligence, and there is a great difference in systems.Each car manufacturer has slightly different functions, definitions, and names for ADAS, commonly they include Blind Spot Detection System, Backup Parking Aid System, Rear Crash Collision Warning System, Lane Departure Warning System, Collision Mitigation System, Adaptive Front-lighting System, Night Vision System, Adaptive Cruise Control System, Pre Crash System, Parking Aid System, the main function lies in providing a safer and easier driving experience for the driver.
Each manufacturer's ADAS contains different system functions; some are in cooperation with the car manufacturer, and are already built in the factory car, and some are provided for the consumers to purchase themselves, and can be additionally installed. Take NXP's BlueBox as an example, it is a product that has similar volume with Blue-ray player, and has multiple parallel/serial/LAN interfaces. In fact, BlueBox is a computer that processes data from sensors such as radar, camera, and vision sensors in a car, then provide the driver with collected data and images, so as to assist the driver in judging vehicle operation.
BlueBox is equipped with a NXP S32V vehicle vision processor and a LS2088A embedded computer processor. S32V belongs to the category of safety controller. It can analyze driving environment, evaluate risk factors, and then indicate the behavior of the car, while LS2088 is a high-performance computing platform matched with it.
The S32V chip contains different graphics processing engines, possesses a high-performance graphics processing accelerator and ARM core, advanced APEX graphics processing and sensor fusion. Its functions include sensor / actuator management and fault detection. In addition to real-time detection of memory, hardware configuration and program flow, fault detection also has the ability of error management.
The LS2088A embedded processor consists of eight 64-bit ARM Cortex-A72 cores, coordinating with a 2GHz special accelerator, high-performance communication interface and DDR4 memory controller, has extremely low latency.
In addition to the two core processors S32V and LS2088A, BlueBox also carries other chips for realizing different sensor nodes functions, which can process information obtained from V2X, radar, vision system, lidar and vehicle status.
BlueBox can achieve the calculation speed of 90000 DMIPS (million instructions per second) at 40W, but BlueBox reduces the use of electronic components such as fan, liquid cooling and unstable thermal management systems compared to ADAS/autopilot solutions provided by other competitors.
To see from a chip perspective, NXP's NXP S32V234 is a vision processor for front- and surround-view camera, machine learning and sensor fusion applications, and the S32V234 is in NXP’s second-generation vision processor series, which is designed to support compute-intensive applications for image processing, and provide an ISP (image signal processor), powerful 3D GPU, dual APEX-2 vision accelerator and security, and support SafeAssure™. The S32V234 is suitable for ADAS, NCAP front-facing cameras, foreign object detection and recognition, surround view, machine learning and sensor fusion applications. S32V234 is specially designed for automotive-level reliability, functional safety and safety measures. It can support vehicle and industrial automation.
The S32V234 has a complete support platform for the S32 Design Studio IDE for Vision, including compilers, debuggers, Vision SDK, Linux BSP and graphics tools. It uses four Arm® Cortex®-A53 cores, running speeds up to 1GHz, and M4 cores with frequency up to 133 MHz. It is supported by OpenCL APEX-CV and APEX graphics tools combined with dual APEX-2 visual accelerator core. It also supports ISO 26262 functional security and is suitable for SIL-C, IEC 61508 and DO 178 applications. Its 3D GPU (GC3000) conforms to OpenCL 1.2 EP 2.0, OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenVG 1.1 standards, and supports hardware security encryption on CSE2. Facing the embedded image signal processing of HDR, color conversion and tone mapping supported by ISP graphics tools, it has MIPI CSI2 and parallel image sensor interface, as well as 4 MB on-chip system RAM, all memory has end-to-end ECC. DRAM controller can support DDR3/DDR3L/LPDDR2. It can run at the operating temperature of nodes ranging from - 40 to 125 °C and is sealed and packaged in 621 FC-BGA.
Before the automobile application progresses to automatic driving in an all-round way, ADAS is the most practical and most popular product in current automobile application. Its market potential is extremely astonishing. No matter which auxiliary system is used, it has great market opportunities. It is worthy of active investment by manufacturers. NXP's ADAS solution will be your best choice.