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