Renesas Electronics America, a premier provider of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced a new, comprehensive, vehicle-level driving platform to accelerate autonomous and automotive driving innovation.
Working in close collaboration with Harbrick, NewFoundry, Arada Systems, eTrans, and Cogent Embedded, Renesas developed a fleet of cars to operate as a modular and open laboratory for automotive customers. This strategy enables safe integrated solutions beyond silicon, while reducing design risk and accelerating time to market through pre-testing and integration.
"Advanced automotive systems for cars are complex to develop and carry a heavy burden of responsibility. With the new development platform, we are leading a unique collaboration with software, IP and tools providers to remove obstacles in the path to automotive innovation," said Amrit Vivekanand, Vice President, Automotive Business Unit, Renesas Electronics America. "Through this bold initiative, we are building vehicle-level platforms that address customer and partner engineering challenges, and spark new innovations in autonomous driving to provide safe and secure driving experiences."
Renesas will expand, develop and offer new vehicle-level platforms that can be used by algorithm experts, sensor makers, system integrators, and other subject matter experts as a working sandbox in real-world environments where they can collaborate, validate, experiment and benchmarking innovative ideas. Renesas will expand the scope of these vehicles going forward to integrate cockpit, HMI, safety, security and powertrain platforms.
A new fleet of vehicles based on Renesas' Autonomous Driving Development Platform demonstrates the integration of such building blocks as sensor fusion, forward camera image recognition, 3D Surround View, and Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) Communication, all powered through Renesas solutions.
Key to rapid software development in the fleet is Harbrick's PolySync, an autonomous driving development platform running on two Renesas R-Car H2 Systems-on-Chips (SoCs), enabling accelerated development of autonomous driving algorithms such as sensor fusion of the vehicle's 8 LIDAR, 5 radar, forward smart camera, V2X box, and inertial measurement unit (IMU). Cogent Embedded's 3D Surround View and Forward Camera Lane Detection running on an R-Car H2 bring state-of-the-art Computer Vision to the fleet.
Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication featuring the Renesas R-Car W2R and R-Car E2 SoCs is integrated into the fleet of cars by eTrans Systems and Arada Systems, using two channels of 5.9 GHz DSRC communication.
Renesas will showcase the first members of the fleet at Renesas DevCon 2015 this week in Anaheim, Calif., with test rides highlighting technologies for sensor fusion, 3D surround view, V2X, and mobile apps integration.
