Marelli presents new AI-based Electronic Control Unit

This technology redefines the standard of traditional Vehicle Control Units (VCU) for motorsport, offering unprecedented performance, efficiency, reliability, computational capabilities and advanced connectivity to meet the sector's growing demands. Compared to previous VCUs, the new solution offers superior performance in computational power. Real-time computing performance is 2.5 times higher; the inter-processor bandwidth is increased by ten times and RAM memory bandwidth is improved, enabling greater reliability in reiterating crucial vehicle operations.

VCUs are high-performance control units that integrate different functions into a single device: engine and chassis control and actuation, data logging and gateway to telemetry and Cloud, in-car networking.

Based on Marelli Motorsport’s know-how in vehicle control solutions, the VEC_480 is engineered to manage the increasing complexity of neural based algorithms in real time (milliseconds). This is achieved through the adoption of an advanced AI Accelerator (NPU), available with a high computing capacity up to 26 TOPS (Tera Operations per Second).

The powerful AI accelerator embedded in the device supports real-time AI inference with low latency and high efficiency, paving the way to neural virtual sensors, data inference with Artificial Intelligence, real-time video processing (track detection, object detection, and more), localisation and positioning, performance analysis, predictive analysis, voice recognition. The technology is also compatible and supports the top AI frameworks, such as TensorFlow, TensorFlow Lite, Keras, PyTorch, and ONNX.