With the electrification of cars changing how they are architected and built, "software-defined vehicles" are now opening up new opportunities to both redefine and package transportation and mobility as services. However, it presents enormous challenges in the design, verification, and production of connected autonomous vehicles.
The served addressable market (SAM) for RISC-V in automotive was 4 million cores in 2020, and that is forecast to rise to 150 million cores in 2022, and to 2.9 billion cores by 2025, according to figures from Deloitte. However, uncertainties around maturity, performance, and security compared to more established automotive ISA have delayed adoption.
The strategic partnership between SoC.one and Imagination aims to address those concerns and position RISC-V as a mainstream, high-performance, secured compute platform for the automotive industry.
SoC.one Cloud is an end-to-end, close-loop, mixed-reality platform that supports automotive OEMs and suppliers in designing, building and validating compute solutions critical to connected and autonomous driving cars. The SoC.one complete 'Digital Twins' approach offers a near real-time, realistic, and repeatable setting, needed to create automotive products that perform well in the stochastic and diverse real world.
"The ability to see a design from the immersive experience of the vehicles, occupants, pedestrians, motorbikes and other objects on the road offers OEMs insight and understanding that can minimise risks, improve development time, and increase safety," said Krishna Raghavan, founder of SoC.one. Raghavan added, "From integration and training for auto-pilot systems, to the fusion of in-vehicle control and infotainment, and integration with automotive edge and cloud data services, the capabilities of SoC.one Cloud will prove to be crucial component of any automotive company's process and development portfolio."
"With our longstanding track record of delivery into automotive and our diverse IP offerings, Imagination's GPU, AI, ethernet and RISC-V CPU cores are suitable for automotive grade, safety-critical applications. An integration of these IPs into SoC.one mix-reality cloud enables the designers to continuously characterise, validate, and develop software for automotive use-cases,” said Shreyas Derashri, Vice President of Compute at Imagination.
Automotive devices-under-x extends from onboard elements (sensors, cameras, ECUs, compute solutions) to infrastructure elements (traffic lights, smart signs, wireless communication) and vehicles (cars, trucks, motorcycles), all utilising IPs from Imagination Technologies.
SoC.one Cloud will now provide the means for developers and software systems to interact with the device-under-x in a close-loop context. Simulation helps the designers understand how an automotive product or device may ultimately function. SoC.one extends this capability to all phases of the product design and development, from conceptualization to stages of implementation and deployment.
