ARM processor dedicated for functional safety applications

ARM processor dedicated for functional safety applications

By Unknown   05:40   No comments:

The Cortex-R52 by ARM was designed to address functional safety in systems that need to comply with ISO 26262 (ASIL D) and IEC 61508 (SIL 3). ST Microelectronics is the first chip vendor, which licensed the processor.

                                                  ARM processor dedicated for functional safety applications

The Cortex-R52 offers hardware-enforced separation of software tasks to ensure that safety-critical code is fully isolated. 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 safety processor 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. It introduces an extra privilege level, which provides support for a hypervisor. This is all achieved without impacting the determinism needed for real time systems and while providing higher levels of performance from single and multicore configurations.

"The Cortex-R52 is the first processor built on the ARMv8-R architecture and it was designed from the ground up to address functional safety," said James McNiven from ARM (United Kingdom). "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. By documenting the strict development process, fault modeling and supporting software isolation, ARM is enabling a faster route to market for partners addressing these applications."

The British company, which was recently acquired by Softbank (Japan) for about 31 billion US-$, presented also the first customer for the new processor: ST Microelectronics. It is expected that French-Italian chipmaker will provide models featuring CAN connectivity – of course, supporting the CAN FD protocol. "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 from ST Microelectronics. "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." First micro-controllers based on Cortex-R52 are expected on the market by 2018.

As an ECU manufacturer, Denso (Japan) supports the launch of the safety processor: "We welcome the development of new processor technology to drive the evolution of embedded real-time control, which is critical to advancing capabilities for autonomous systems," said Hideki Sugimoto. The availability of ARM’s 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 offers a 35-percent performance uplift compared to the 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 using the Green Hills Compiler 2017.

"Green Hills Software is expanding its support for ARM processors with optimizing compiler solutions for the Cortex-R52," said Dan Mender. "Through close collaboration with ARM, we deliver the industry's highest performing safety certified compiler for the Cortex-R52, enabling customers to develop safety-critical products at the highest certified levels of automotive (ASIL D) and industrial safety (SIL 3)."

Read More

Connected cars – how the tech and auto industry integration is accelerating

Connected cars – how the tech and auto industry integration is accelerating

By Unknown   05:28   No comments:

From Google Cars to Apple and McLaren to Daimler Benz and in-car voice activated Microsoft office to specially designed safety chips – the journey is only starting

The ever tightening integration of the car industry and the digital tech industry appears to be accelerating if the number of deals, technology announcements and rumours is anything to go by.

Cars and digital technology are suddenly everywhere. In the period of just a couple of days.

Apple to buy a British supercar maker reported the FT.

This was denied by McLaren, the UK sports car manufacturer and owner of McLaren F1 racing team. But it didn’t stop the spread of comment about why this would be logical.

In another breaking news story, the electric car maker Tesla is reportedly being sued for being low on horsepower.

A group of Norwegians is has filed a lawsuit claiming that Tesla’s Model S P85D only reached horsepower of 469 and not 700 as had been marketed as an ‘insane’ mode. Tesla rejected the claims. The case is due to begin in Oslo in December. In China Tesla is facing a lawsuit which centres around its autopilot function following a fatal crash.

Over in Germany, Daimler Benz said it would extend its deal with T-Systems, the business arm of Deutsche Telekom which included its connected car platform. T-Systems connects over two million Daimler vehicles across the globe via Daimler’s proprietary connected car platform, and it will continue to operate the existing "Mercedes me connect" services for the next generation of vehicles as well. The services include live traffic information, safety functions such as emergency call, convenience services such as remote control, and infotainment apps like Internet radio and hotel/parking search functions.

Microsoft this week said in a blog that it was working with Daimler and other auto makers to bring voice activated Office365 to the car.

It said: “Many of us love our cars, but we don’t necessarily love spending time in them during the work week if it means inching forward on the freeway or being stuck in stop-and-go traffic. When we’re behind the wheel during those long commutes, we often end up behind the curve by the time we get to work.”

"To help make time in the car more productive, Microsoft is working with auto companies to bring to the car the same Office 365 communication and collaboration services you’ve come to rely on at work. Office 365 in the car includes Microsoft Exchange support, which integrates your work calendar, to-do list and contacts, with all of them using your car’s voice and navigation systems."

Daimler AG recently announced it will start using what it calls, “In Car Office” in some of its Mercedes models beginning in mid-2017.

“Microsoft is working with auto companies to make time spent in vehicles more efficient and connected to people’s daily lives,” said Kevin Dallas, corporate vice president of Business Development at Microsoft. “This collaboration with Daimler represents a new emphasis on consumer productivity within the car as we look forward to autonomous driving in the future.”

The system, “knows about your next phone conferences and dials you in automatically while you’re in the car,” said Dieter Zetsche, chairman of the board of management of Daimler AG and head of Mercedes-Benz Cars, speaking at IFA 2016 in Berlin earlier this month.

The service can also tap into your calendar data and auto-populate your car’s navigation unit with driving directions for an upcoming meeting. In the future, when autonomous vehicles become a reality, the service will become a platform for more extensive tasks like Skype video chats.

Here the in the UK and deep down at the technology level ARM Holdings, announced a ‘safety’ chip for autonomous vehicles.

ARM has launched a new real-time processor with advanced safety features for autonomous vehicles and medical and industrial robots. The ARM Cortex-R52 was designed to address functional safety in systems that must comply with ISO 26262 ASIL D and IEC 61508 SIL 3, the most stringent safety standards in the automotive and industrial markets

STMicroelectronics is the first ARM partner to announce it has licensed the high performance processor to enable it to create highly integrated SoCs for the automotive market.

The Cortex-R52 is the first processor built on the ARMv8-R architecture and it was designed from the ground up to address functional safety," said James McNiven, general manager for CPU and media processing groups, ARM. "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. By documenting the strict development process, fault modelling and supporting software isolation, ARM is enabling a faster route to market for partners addressing these applications

The Cortex-R52 offers hardware-enforced separation of software tasks to ensure safety-critical code is fully isolated. 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 GM at the Automotive Digital Division, STM Microelectronics. The ability to compartmentalise software provides our users with the best solution for safety without loss of determinism. Its virtualisation 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, systems and components is supporting the launch.

ARM was sold to Japan's Softbank back in July. Read Why did Softbank buy ARM

So it appears that whatever else you will be doing in your car in the future, you won’t be driving it 

Read More

Intel Corp. Likely to Adopt ARM Architecture for Future Smartphone Processors

Intel Corp. Likely to Adopt ARM Architecture for Future Smartphone Processors

By Unknown   05:27   No comments:

An Intel exec strongly hints at this in a recently published interview.
A little while back, microprocessor giant Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) made public that it had cancelled its SoFIA family of processors for low-end and mid-range smartphones and Broxton for high-end smartphones. When this news broke, it seemed to me that the chip giant had all but canned its plans to compete in the smartphone applications processor market.

However, at a recent investor conference, Intel exec Brice Hill hinted that the company may try its hand at the mobile applications processor market.

Then, in a recent interview with IDG News Service, Intel's Murthy Renduchintala flat-out said the cancellation of the SoFIA/Broxton projects doesn't imply that Intel is "no longer doing mobile platforms."

He even went on to say that, going forward, Intel's goal with respect to mobile platforms is to "talk less and do more."

So, it's quite clear that Intel plans to reenter the market for mobile applications processors. However, buried in the interview, Murthy strongly hinted that any future smartphone processors from Intel would be based on ARM processors, rather than Intel's own Atom processors.

ARM is the established architecture in mobile:

During the interview, IDG News Service asked Murthy if the company would be "open to the idea of taking an ARM CPU license."

Murthy's response was "yes." He further went on to explain that "there are many areas in the ARM ecosystem where Intel can pragmatically play in for its own benefit," and that he is a "big believer in paying respect to established ecosystems."

Remember that in the mobile processor market, the ARM architecture is the established standard with overwhelmingly dominant market share. Intel tried to capture some share with processors based on its Atom processor cores (these cores implement Intel's own X86 instruction set architecture), but those efforts clearly failed.

Although I don't blame the X86 architecture for that failure, I do believe Intel's Atom processor designs were not competitive with what ARM's processor designs (which can be licensed by mobile chip manufacturers) had to offer in terms of performance/power/area.

I get the sense that Murthy recognizes that the easiest and safest way to reenter the mobile processor market (and actually succeed in it) is to rely on as many third-party technologies as possible.

An interesting longer-term opportunity:

It is by no means guaranteed that just because Intel reenters the smartphone processor market, it will actually be successful. Intel's execution over the last several years in the mobile processor market was nothing less than atrocious, and the venture ultimately wound up costing shareholders a lot of money.

Read More

ARM launches new chip for medical robots and autonomous cars

ARM launches new chip for medical robots and autonomous cars

By Unknown   23:33   No comments:

Japanese-owned chip designer ARM has today unveiled a new chip designed with safety as its key feature.

Unlike standard chipsets, the ARM Cortex-R52 is designed to comply with the most stringent safety standards in the automotive and industrial markets.

Such a chipset is necessary for a number of new emergent computing fields, including self-driving cars and medical robots.

In these fields, compromised code on the chip itself could result in very dangerous consequences when in use.

To mitigate this danger, within the Cortex-R52 chip safety-critical code is fully isolated by ‘hardware-enforced separation’ of software tasks.

“The Cortex-R52 is the first processor built on the ARMv8-R architecture and it was designed from the ground up to address functional safety,” said James McNiven, general manager for CPU at ARM.

While the chips were designed by ARM, the company has already signed a deal with STMicroelectronics for them to be the first licensed manufacturer of the Cortex-R52.

STMicroelectronics themselves noted the security provided by the chips as a key selling point.

“The Cortex-R52’s ability to compartmentalize software provides our users with the best solution for safety without loss of determinism,” said Fabio Marchiò, automotive digital division general manager of STMicroelectronics.

The announcement of this chip comes at a time of growth for autonomous vehicles and other critical robotic systems.

With recent hacking demonstrations showing the relative insecurity of the current chips and software used in these systems, the new ARM chip could find a strong market niche.

The release of the Cortex-R52 also follows ARM’s recent acquisition by Japanese electronics company Softbank.

One of the main drivers of this deal was for Softbank to acquire the chip technology which would underpin the explosion of so-called Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

As autonomous cars and industrial/medical robots are key parts of the IoT ecosystem, this acquisition already appears to be bearing fruit for Softbank.

Further demonstrating the interest in this sector, key rival Intel earlier this year acquired Yogitech, another company which specialized in designing safety chips.

Read More

ARM releases chip for safety-critical devices like autonomous car systems

ARM releases chip for safety-critical devices like autonomous car systems

By Unknown   23:51   No comments:

STMicroelectronics is licensing the the Cortex-R5 to build (system on chips) SoCs for the automotive market.

ARM on Tuesday announced the release of a new chip, called the Cortex-R5, that's designed for real-time embedded systems with critical safety needs, such as autonomous driving or surgical automation.

STMicroelectronics is the first ARM partner to announce it's licensing the new processor to build highly integrated SoCs for the automotive market.

The new chip was developed to meet the requirements of the most stringent industrial safety standards (IEC 61508 SIL 3) and automotive safety standards (ISO 26262 ASIL D), making it easy to adopt. It also uses hardware to simplify its integration into complex real-time software environments, as well as to separate software tasks to protect and isolate safety-critical code. This allows the hardware to be managed by a software hypervisor.

"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," Fabio Marchiò, Automotive Digital Division General Manager of STMicroelectronics, said 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."

The new processor, the first built on the ARMv8-R architecture, comes a couple weeks after Softbank finalized its acquisition of ARM with the intent of pushing into the Internet of Things.

Read More

Chip designer ARM launches processor fit for driverless cars

Chip designer ARM launches processor fit for driverless cars

By Unknown   23:40   No comments:

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.

Read More

ARM announces safety-first IoT processor for robots and cars

ARM announces safety-first IoT processor for robots and cars

By Unknown   23:07   No comments:

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

Read More

ARM chips: how they’ve changed your life

ARM chips: how they’ve changed your life

By Unknown   02:01   No comments:

ARM microchips are used by millions of people to connect everyday devices and appliances over the internet. Arm’s designs lie at the heart of almost every smartphone sold today. Many cheaper phones use its off-the-shelf chips but for more sophisticated and expensive handsets, chipmakers often customise Arm’s technology to produce more distinctive features. With Intel backing out of the mobile processor market earlier this year to focus on servers, modems and the “internet of things”, there are few viable alternatives to Arm.

Television

Many modern televisions enable users to watch programmes and films through apps such as Netflix, which are powered by ARM-based processors. The firm’s technology is also frequently used in remote controls and set-top boxes.

Smartphones and tablets

ARM technology helps power both smartphones and iPads. E-readers, such as Kindles, and digital cameras also use the products.

Home ‘smart’ systems

Smart household appliances often use ARM-based chips to give homeowners greater control over their functions – and costs. This can include internet-connected thermostats, allowing users to control their heating via their smartphone, fridges that alert users when they have run out of groceries, and electricity metres that can help save money on energy bills.

Wearable gadgets

Fitness trackers and smart watches are becoming increasingly popular with consumers. These gadgets have relied on ARM technology for years.

Internal car systems

ARM-based chips are frequently used in cars to show drivers maps, offer voice recognition and to control music. They are also being used in prototypes for self-driving cars to power systems that trigger automatic electronic braking, for example. The technology could also be used in smart roads warning drivers about spots of black ice ahead.

Drones

Drones are becoming increasingly popular, be it families flying them in the park or photographers capturing aerial shots. They rely on tiny computers called microcontrollers and ARM estimates that a quarter of the chips made last year used its technology.

Energy efficient cities

Street lamps that dim themselves and parking meters that detect when spaces are empty are examples of sensors being used by cities to cut costs and help inhabitants. ARM believes this sector holds great potential for its business.

Read More

New Cavium ThunderX2 adopts 64-bit ARM-based servers to address application and workload requirements

New Cavium ThunderX2 adopts 64-bit ARM-based servers to address application and workload requirements

By Unknown   02:34   No comments:

Semiconductor vendor Cavium announced Monday ThunderX2, its second generation of workload optimized ARM server SoCs that targets high performance volume servers deployed by public/private cloud and telecom communications data centers and high performance computing applications. It is optimized for data center workloads such as compute, security, storage, data analytics, network function virtualization and distributed databases.

The ThunderX2 line of processors currently includes four workload optimized processors targeting different workloads.

The ThunderX2_CP has been optimized for cloud compute workloads such as private and public clouds, web serving, web caching, web search, commercial HPC workloads such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and reservoir modeling. This line supports multiple 10/25/40/50/100 GbE network Interfaces and PCIe Gen3 interfaces. It also includes accelerators for virtualization and vSwitch offload.

The ThunderX2_ST has been optimized for big data, cloud storage, massively parallel processing (MPP) databases and Data warehousing workloads. This family supports multiple 10/25/40/50/100 GbE network interfaces, PCIe Gen3 interfaces and SATAv3 interfaces. It also includes hardware accelerators for data protection/ integrity/security, user to user efficient data movement.

The ThunderX2_SC has been optimized for secure web front-end, security appliances and cloud RAN type workloads. This family supports multiple 10/25/40/50/100 GbE interfaces and PCIe Gen3 interfaces. Integrated hardware accelerators include Cavium’s industry leading, 5th generation NITROX security technology with acceleration for IPSec, RSA and SSL.

The ThunderX2_NT has been optimized for media servers, scale-out embedded applications and NFV type workloads. This family supports multiple 10/25/40/50/100 GbE interfaces. It also includes OCTEON style hardware accelerators for packet parsing, shaping, lookup, QoS and forwarding.

“The Cavium ThunderX2 will expand the market opportunity for ARM-based server technologies by addressing demanding application and workload requirements for compute, storage networking and security,” said Simon Segars, CEO, ARM. “ThunderX2 demonstrates Cavium’s ability to deliver a combination of innovation and engineering execution and the new product family increases the momentum for server deployments powered by ARM processors in large scale data centers and end user environments.”

Cavium’s ThunderX2 SoC line is supported by a comprehensive software ecosystem ranging from platform level systems management and firmware to commercial operating systems, development environments and applications.

Cavium has actively engaged in server industry standards groups such as UEFI and delivered numerous reference platforms to an array of community and corporate partners. Cavium has also demonstrated its position in the open source software community driving upstream kernel enablement for ThunderX, actively contributing to Linaro’s enterprise and networking groups, investing in Linux Foundation projects such as Xen and OPNFV and sponsoring the FreeBSD Foundation’s ARMv8 server implementation.

ThunderX2 will deliver two to three times the performance across a range of standard benchmarks and applications compared to ThunderX, while boosting the market reach of the ThunderX line of processors by targeting applications that require high single thread performance such as web search, graph analytics, a variety of enterprise applications such as massively parallel processing (MPP) databases, data warehousing and enterprise HPC applications such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and reservoir modelling. ThunderX2 will deliver comparable performance at a better total cost of ownership compared to the next generation of traditional server processors.

Read More