The Cortex R52 is coming to a robot near you - ARM announces safety-first IoT processor for robots and cars
MICROPROCESSOR
DESIGNER ARM has announced a new chip for real-time safety-critical
applications when humans come into contact with machines.
The
Cortex R-52 has been five years in development and is engineered to meet new
safety standards as ARM takes aim at the growing market of large-scale smart
devices, such as surgical robots and self-driving cars.
Chip
manufacturers see the safety-critical processor as an important growth market
as the IoT moves more into the consumer realm. Intel scooped up Yogitech in
April, an IoT startup focused on boosting the security credentials of chips
used in robots, self-driving cars and other autonomous devices.
The
new ARM chip can switch between tasks 14 times faster than its predecessor, the
Cortex R-5, according to John Ronco, vice president of product marketing at
ARM, who said that the design has already been commercially licensed to
semiconductor firm STMicroelectronics.
Safety-critical
chips are vital in situations where autonomous or semi-autonomous machines
could cause injury or death in the event of a fault or a hack.
Vehicles
are becoming increasingly dependent on software to optimise performance and
make autonomous decisions, but one of the key problems holding back
developments such as driverless cars is concern over how easily they can be
hacked and the consequences of software bugs.
ARM
claimed that the Cortex R-52 "delivers the highest level of integrated
capability for functional safety" of any ARM chip so far.
"Cortex-R52
implements hardware to simplify the integration of increasingly complex
real-time software environments while providing the robust separation of
software necessary to protect safety-critical code," ARM said on its
website.
"As
the first ARMv8-R processor, Cortex-R52 introduces an extra privilege level
which provides support for a hypervisor."
ARM
unveiled the Cortex-A73 processor and Mali G71 CPU in May which it said will
power the majority of virtual reality-ready smartphones in 2017.
Formerly
the UK's biggest technology firm, ARM was recently acquired by Japan's SoftBank
Group for £23.3bn. μ
