ARM Aims for Self-Driving Cars With New Safety-Focused SoC

ARM Aims for Self-Driving Cars With New Safety-Focused SoC

By Unknown   23:16   No comments:

The company's Cortex-R52 targets markets where safety is critical, including autonomous vehicles, robotics and health care.

ARM is looking to establish itself in the burgeoning autonomous car market with a new chip design that is aimed at addressing the high safety standards needed for not only driverless vehicles but also other areas such as industrial and medical robots.

Company officials on Sept. 20 unveiled the Cortex-R52, a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design built on the company's ARMv8-R architecture that is designed to comply with a range of safety standards—such as ISO 26262 ASIL D and IEC 61508 SIL 3—that apply to situations in the growing internet of things (IoT), such as autonomous cars and robots in health care settings, where safety and security is paramount in the interaction between humans and machines.

The includes with robots that assist doctors in surgery to self-driving cars that need to understand the environment around them and immediately react to ensure the safety of the drivers and the people around the cars. In addition, the systems need to be highly secure to protect them against hackers.

"We are helping partners to meet particular market opportunities, especially in fully autonomous vehicles and robotics systems where specific functionality is required for safety-critical tasks," James McNiven, general manager for CPU and media processing groups at ARM, said in a statement.

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Like other chip companies, ARM—which is being bought by Softbank for $32.2 billion—is working to branch out beyond its core markets to gain traction in a broad range of emerging growth areas being fueled by the rapid proliferation of connected devices, systems and sensors that make up the growing IoT. ARM designs SoCs and licenses those designs to a wide variety of chip manufacturers, such as Qualcomm, Samsung and Applied Micro. Most smartphones and tablets run on ARM-designed processors, but now company officials are looking to extend the reach of the architecture into other areas, from the data center to the IoT.

A growing number of ARM chip partners—including Qualcomm and Broadcom—are rolling out new products for the autonomous vehicle space. ARM also has been building up its capabilities in the IoT, including with the acquisition last year of Offspark, a company that specialized in security software for connected devices and sensors.

In a post on the company blog, James Scobie, a product manager at ARM, wrote about the growing demand for safety and security in IoT systems.

"Across multiple markets, electronic systems are becoming more complex—including automotive, industrial control and healthcare," Scobie wrote. "Vehicles are beginning to drive themselves, industrial robots are becoming increasingly collaborative, and medical systems are automated to assist with surgery or deliver medication. More of these systems are demanding functionally safe operation and requiring that functional safety be provided at a higher safety level than previous generations of systems demanded."

The Cortex-R52 architecture was created to address those functional safety needs, not only in self-driving cars, but also in increasingly automated factories that include autonomous robots that use machine learning and vision systems to enable them to work with less human control, he wrote.

"Outside the factory, robotics will be used in environments too harsh for humans, such as the nuclear industry, where there is a need to maintain precise and assured operation," Scobie wrote. "They can also be used in the medical operating theaters with remote surgery. In both areas, functionally safe operation is critical."

A key point in the Cortex-R52 is that there is what officials called hardware-enforced separation of various software tasks to make sure the code that is critical for safety is isolated. The hardware is managed by a software hypervisor. Not only does this ensure the protection of the code, but also lessens the amount of code that must be safety-certified, which makes software integration, maintenance and validation easier and development faster, they said.

"The Cortex-R52's ability to compartmentalize software provides our users with the best solution for safety without loss of determinism," Fabio Marchiò, vice president of STMicroelectronics' Automotive and Discrete Group and general manager of its Automotive Digital Division, said in a statement. "Its virtualization support simplifies the consolidation of applications and functions into a single processor, delivering a shorter integration time."

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ARM created its Cortex-R52 processor for self-driving cars

ARM created its Cortex-R52 processor for self-driving cars

By Unknown   00:55   No comments:

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.

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ARM Announces the Cortex-R52 CPU: Deterministic & Safe, For ADAS & More

ARM Announces the Cortex-R52 CPU: Deterministic & Safe, For ADAS & More

By Unknown   00:46   No comments:

Though it didn’t attract a ton of attention at the time, back in 2013 ARM announced the ARMv8-R architecture.

An update for ARM’s architecture for real-time CPUs, ARMv8-R was developed to further the real-time platform by adding support for newer features such as virtualization and memory protection. At the time the company didn’t announce any specific CPU designs for the architecture, but rather just announced the architecture on its own.

Now just under 3 years later, ARM is announcing their first ARMv8-R CPU design this evening with the Cortex-R52. An upgrade of sorts to ARM’s existing Cortex-R5, the R52 is the company’s first implementation of ARMv8-R. R52 makes specific use of many of the new features enabled by the architecture, while improving performance at the same time. ARM is pitching the new CPU core at markets that need a safety-critical CPU – a market that the Cortex-R series has been in for a while – where the deterministic nature of the CPU’s execution model is critical to ensuring quick and accurate execution.

While the focus on today’s CPU design announcement is on functionality and utility over microarchitecture, ARM has revealed a bit about how the Cortex-R52 is organized under the hood. The microarchitecture is a direct evolution of the previous Cortex-R5. This means we’re looking at a dual-issue in-order execution pipeline, with a pipeline length of 8 stages. Broadly speaking, this description is very similar to that of the better-known Cortex-A7/A53 cores, which implies that this is a real-time optimized version of the basic elements in that design.

As the Cortex-R series is focused on determinism and real-time responsiveness over total performance, ARM doesn’t heavily promote these cores on the basis of performance. But at least within the Cortex-R family, they are talking about a performance increase of upwards of 35% in common CPU benchmarks. More important for this market than throughput however is responsiveness: for the R52, ARM has done some specific work to improve interrupt entry and context switching performance, doubling the former and achieving a staggering 14-fold increase on the latter.

The big deal here of course is the deterministic nature of the CPU. The entire microarchitecture is optimized to avoid variable time, non-deterministic operations, which is why it’s an in-order processor to begin with. This design extends to how memory is managed as well, with ARM avoiding a virtual memory system and its associated TLB translation-misses in favor of a model they call the Protected System Memory Architecture (PSMA), which is used in conjunction with an MPU to handle memory operations without the translation.

On the safety side of matters, the R52 has a few different error-resiliency features to ensure accuracy. Multi-core lock step returns for this design, allowing two R52 cores to execute the same task in parallel for redundancy. And on the memory side of matters, ECC is offered across both the memory busses and the memory itself, in order to avoid random bitflips

Meanwhile in terms of new functionality for hardware developers, as part of ARMv8-R, Cortex-R52 implements support for hardware virtualization. Like virtually everything else in R52, this is deterministic as well, with the hypervisor working with the MPU to offer each guest OS its own section of the physical memory space. According to ARM this is a particularly important advancement, as previous means of separating tasks on real-time CPUs were non-deterministic, which is an obvious problem for the target market.

The significance of virtualization in a real-time processor is that it allows for multiple tasks to be executed on the R52 without interfering with each other. In large, complex devices (e.g. cars), this allows for fewer processors within the device, as these tasks can be consolidated onto a smaller number of processors. At the same time, the rigid separation between the tasks means that it’s possible to run both safety-critical and non-critical (but still real-time) tasks on an R52 together, knowing that the latter will not interrupt the safety-critical tasks. For cars and other devices where there is stringent safety certification, this is especially useful as it means that other tasks can be added (via their own guest OS) without invalidating the certifications of the safety-critical tasks.

This is also why ARM’s earlier context switching and interrupt entry improvements are so important. With a hypervisor now in play and multiple tasks executing on a single processor, the vastly improved ability to switch between tasks is critical for allowing multi-tasking without a major performance hit from context switching overhead.

Finally, for the potential market for the Cortex-R52, ARM is pushing the big three traditional markets for real-time and safety-critical processors; automotive, industrial, and medical. All three of these make significant use of real-time functionality, and there’s also a great deal of overlap on safety as well.

ARM is particular interested in the Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) market, where the Cortex-R is part of a full system of ARM IP. A full ADAS setup from start to end would utilize all three processor types – M, R, and A – with the Cortex-R handling the real-time decision making and executing on those decisions, while Cortex-A would be used to handle sensor perception/interpretation, and Cortex-M would be in many of the individual sensors.

Wrapping things up, as with most other ARM IP announcements, the announcement of the Cortex-R52 is setting the stage for future products. ARM isn’t talking about specific customers at this time, but they already have a number of companies who have licensed ARMv8-R and will be in need of a CPU design to go with it. To that end, we should be seeing Cortex-R52 start appearing under the hood of various devices in the coming years.

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