These will include Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), in-vehicle infotainment (IVI), and gateway applications on a single-chip that’s been built using the latest 3-nanometre automotive process technology from TSMC.
The R-Car X5H SoC is the first device in the R-Car X5 series and offer an improved level of integration and performance that will allow OEMs and Tier 1s to shift to centralised Electronic Control Units (ECUs) for streamlined development and future-proof system solutions.
According to Renesas, the R-Car X5H is among the first in the industry to offer highly integrated, secure processing solutions on a single chip for multiple automotive domains, thanks to its hardware-based isolation technology. Additionally, the SoC offers the option to expand AI and graphics processing performance using chiplet technology.
The R-Car X5H directly addresses the growing complexity of Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV) development where the challenges include optimising compute performance, power consumption, cost, hardware and software integration – while ensuring vehicle safety.
By tightly coupling application processing, real-time processing, GPU and AI compute, large display capabilities, and sensor connectivity on a single chip, these devices will, according to Renesas, enable a new class of automated driving, IVI and gateway applications.
The SoC series enables AI acceleration of up to 400 TOPS, and GPU processing of up to 4 TFLOPS. It incorporates a total of 32 Arm Cortex-A720AE CPU cores for application processing, delivering over 1,000K DMIPS performance; and six Arm Cortex-R52 dual lockstep CPU cores delivering over 60K DMIPS performance with support for ASIL D capabilities without external microcontrollers (MCUs).
Manufactured using one of TSMC’s most advanced process nodes, the SoC series achieves both top-end CPU performance and a 30-35 percent reduction in power consumption when compared to devices designed for a 5-nm process node.
While the R-Car Gen 5 SoCs come with powerful native NPU and GPU processing engines, Renesas is also offering customers the ability to scale up their performance through chiplet extensions.
When combining a 400-TOPS on-chip NPU with an external NPU via a chiplet extension, for example, it’s possible to scale their AI processing performance by three to four times or more. To enable chiplet integration, the R-Car X5H offers the standard UCle (Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express) die-to-die interconnect and APIs, supporting interoperability with other components in a multi-die system, even if they are non-Renesas chips.
This flexible design approach allows car OEMs and Tier 1s to mix and match different functions and customise their systems including future upgrades across vehicle platforms.
Safety remains a number one priority and while other SoCs rely solely on software-based isolation, the R-Car X5H SoC also offers hardware-based Freedom from Interference (FFI) technology. This hardware design implementation securely isolates safety-critical functions, such as brake-by-wire, from non-critical functions.
Functions deemed safety critical can be assigned their own separate, redundant domains, each having its own independent CPU core, memory and interfaces, so preventing potentially catastrophic vehicle failures in the event of a hardware or software fault from a different domain. The R-Car X5H also comes with Quality of Service (QoS) management that determines workload priorities and assigns processing resources in real time.
“Our latest innovations in the R-Car Gen 5 platform tackle the complex challenges the automotive industry faces today,” said Vivek Bhan, Senior Vice President and General Manager of High-Performance Computing at Renesas. “Our customers are looking for end-to-end automotive-grade system solutions that cover everything from hardware optimisation, safety compliance to flexible and scalable architecture selection and seamless tools and software integration. Our R-Car Gen 5 Family meets these demands, and we are committed to helping the industry accelerate SDV development and Shift-Left innovations for the next era of automotive technology.”
Renesas’ latest R-Car X5H and all future Gen 5 products are designed to accelerate SDV development by combining hardware and software into a comprehensive development platform. The newly launched R-Car Open Access (RoX) SDV platform integrates all essential hardware, operating systems (OS), software and tools needed for automotive developers to rapidly develop next-generation vehicles with secure and continuous software updates.
RoX provides OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers the flexibility to virtually design a broad range of scalable compute solutions for ADAS, IVI, gateway, and cross-domain fusion systems as well as body control, domain, and zone control systems.
The R-Car X5H will be sampling to select automotive customers in 1H/2025, with production scheduled in 2H 2027.
