ARM,
the British chip designer powering the global mobile phone industry, launched a
new processor on Tuesday for driverless cars, seeking to secure its place at
the heart of the burgeoning industry.
Bought
by Japan's SoftBank for $32 billion this month, ARM said the processor was
designed to increase safety in increasingly complex systems and could work
across a range of industries from autonomous vehicles to industrial and medical
robotics.
The
Cortex-R52 processor, which has been under construction for between 3 and 5
years, has been licensed to Franco-Italian chipmaker and partner
STMicroelectronics in its first deal.
ARM
said the processor was designed to keep the most critical software code
separate, in order to protect the running of the platform. That would enable it
to improve safety when a car wants to overtake, accelerate or break suddenly,
for example.
"If
you have a piece of safety critical code, you want to be sure that nothing can
interfere with that," John Ronco, VP Product Marketing, told Reuters.
The
26-year-old ARM, based in Cambridge, eastern England, provides the technology
in nearly all smartphones including Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy.
It
is also poised to play a central role in the tech industry shift to the
'internet of things' - a network of devices, vehicles and building sensors that
collect and exchange data.
"What
we see is that all of these systems have a similar technology platform, a
similar framework in terms of what they're doing, and they have the same
requirements in terms of having processors that can safely make decisions about
what the system should do," Ronco said.
Autonomous
or driverless cars are seen as the next big thing for the tech industry, with
the British government putting the market value at 900 billion pounds ($1.17
trillion) worldwide.
Traditional
automakers face competition from rivals such as Tesla and technology firms such
as Alphabet Inc's unit Google, which wants eventually to be able to deploy
fully autonomous vehicles without human controls.
