AI domain controller SoC family for ADAS to L4 AVs

Ambarella has announced the CV3 AI domain controller family. This fully scalable, power-efficient CVflow family of SoCs offers the automotive industry's highest AI processing performance, up to 500 eTOPS, representing a 42x increase over its prior automotive family. Providing up to 16 Arm Cortex-A78AE CPU cores, the device provides up to a 30x boost in CPU performance over the previous generation in support of AV software applications. This family allows centralised, single-chip processing for multi-sensor perception, including high-resolution vision, radar, ultrasonic and lidar, and deep fusion for multiple sensor modalities and AV path planning. The result is robust ADAS and L2+ to Level 4 AD systems with higher levels of environmental perception in harsh lighting, weather and driving conditions for driver viewing and machine perception.

"With our new CV3 AI domain controller family, we are now capable of running the full ADAS and AD stack with a single chip while providing unprecedented performance and power efficiency," said Fermi Wang, president and CEO of Ambarella. "Through enhancements to our on-chip ISP, along with simultaneous radar processing that can take advantage of our Oculii adaptive AI algorithms, Ambarella is helping the automotive industry unlock greater levels of perception accuracy across all environmental conditions to realise the promise of autonomous driving."

The family marks the debut of the company's next-generation CVflow architecture, which continues its algorithm-first design philosophy. This drove the development of the on-chip NVP, with up to 500 eTOPS of AI compute, industry-leading power efficiency and support for the recent advancements in neural network inferences.

The family's unique hardware scalability enables automakers to unify their software stacks over their complete retail portfolios while lessening the cost and complexity of software development. This scalability directly addresses the growing complexity of automotive software by offering an alternative to the fragmented ADAS SoC options from competitors. Furthermore, the family speeds automakers' development timelines while easing the deployment of new features by giving the headroom for a single, robust OTA update implementation.

Using a comprehensive set of mature software tools and a robust SDK, its flexible CVflow AI platform offers customers an unprecedented opportunity to innovate and differentiate products in the marketplace.

The family also incorporates the company's next-generation ISP, extending the company's image signal processing quality. By simultaneously supporting up to 12 physical or 20 virtual cameras, a single CV3 can process the complete sensor suite, which for typical L2+ deployments possesses ten cameras, five radar modules and multiple ultrasonic sensors. Higher-performance stereo and dense optical flow engines also deliver greater depth and motion perception.