ARM is beefing up its safety technology for the ARM Cortex-R52, a processor designed for self-driving vehicles.
The
Cambridge, England-based company was recently acquired by Japan’s SoftBank for
$31 billion. And now it is expanding its chip designs to include a processor
with the robust, real-time performance needed for autonomous cars.
The
new chip will simplify the path for certification of automotive applications,
industrial robots, and medical operations. The processor — which ARM will
license to other chip manufacturers — must comply with tough safety standards
such as ISO 26262 ASIL D and IEC 61508 SIL 3.
It
will enable applications as diverse as surgical automation, safety management
and automotive powertrain control. STMicroelectronics is the first ARM chip
manufacturing partner to announce it has licensed the high-performance
processor to enable it to create highly integrated system-on-chips (SoCs) for
the automotive market.
“If
these systems go wrong in any way, they can affect life,” said Richard York,
worldwide marketing and business development manager at ARM, in an interview
with VentureBeat. “The R-52 will make it much easier to do increasingly complex
software.”
The
Cortex-R52 offers hardware-enforced separation of software tasks to ensure
safety-critical code is fully isolated. So when one part of the system goes
down, it’s easier to decipher what happened. This allows the hardware to be
managed by a software hypervisor policing the execution and resourcing of
tasks. By enabling the precise and robust separation of software, the
Cortex-R52 decreases the amount of code that must be safety-certified, so
speeding up development as software integration, maintenance and validation is
easier. The processor also deals with increased software complexity while
delivering the determinism and fast context switching that real-time systems
demand.
“The
Cortex-R52 supports our Smart Driving vision by enabling a new range of
high-performance, power-efficient SoCs for any in-vehicle application demanding
real-time operation and the highest levels of functional safety, including
powertrain, chassis and ADAS,” said Fabio Marchiò, Automotive & Discrete
group vice president and Automotive Digital Division general manager at
STMicroelectronics, in a statement. “The Cortex-R52’s ability to
compartmentalize software provides our users with the best solution for safety
without loss of determinism. Its virtualization support simplifies the consolidation
of applications and functions into a single processor, delivering a shorter
integration time.”
Denso,
a leading global supplier of advanced automotive technology, is supporting the
launch.The availability of ARM Fast Models and Cycle Models enables software
partners to develop solutions for the processor. They further speed the path to
market as software developers will get access to the Cortex-R52 early in the
design process.
The
Cortex-R52 is 35 percent faster than the previous generation Cortex-R5, which
is already deployed in a range of safety applications. It has achieved a score
of 1.36 Automark/MHz on the EEMBC AutoBench, the highest in its class, using
the Green Hills Compiler 2017.
The
processor has protections against various kinds of random errors, design
errors, and software errors. If it senses a system problem, the processor has
to handle cores such as shutting down a vehicle and bringing it to a safe halt.
So it has to be able to sense, perceive and analyze, make a decision, and acutate
(or execute on that decision).
James
Scobie, product manager for the Cortex-R52, said chips based on the design will
likely be available in 2018.
