NXP demonstrates complete autonomous vehicle platform

17th May 2016

Jordan Mulcare

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Marking a significant milestone in the fast-approaching self-driving vehicles era, NXP Semiconductors has demonstrated a comprehensive and highly manufacturable autonomous vehicles platform leveraging NXP’s BlueBox engine and deploying NXP silicon and software solutions at each ADAS node. The system demonstration incorporates the BlueBox central computing engine, together with radar, lidar, and vision sensing, as well as an onboard secure V2X system – all of which are powered by NXP silicon currently in volume production or sampling to customers now.

Already in customers’ hands at four of the top five largest carmakers in the world, the BlueBox engine works in NXP’s comprehensive autonomous vehicles platform to provide OEMs and their suppliers with the technology they need to meet the stringent safety, power and processing performance requirements of the global automotive industry, using readily available NXP technology. The free programmability, outstanding performance-per-power ratios, and deep system awareness of NXP’s autonomous vehicles platform makes it an exceptional resource for the near-term creation of radically innovative self-driving cars.

NXP introduces its new autonomous vehicles platform just months after becoming the world’s #1 provider of silicon to the worldwide automotive market. NXP is also a world leader in ADAS processors, having shipped more than 30 million ADAS processors worldwide to date. Eight of the world’s top 10 largest carmakers use ADAS processors from NXP.

“With this industry-first platform, NXP is leveraging its worldwide automotive silicon leadership to dramatically advance the state of autonomous vehicles,” said Kurt Sievers, Executive Vice President and General Manager of NXP’s Automotive Business. “Our systems-level expertise, deep understanding of complex ADAS engineering challenges, and broad portfolio of NXP products meeting automotive-grade (ISO 26262-level) functional safety requirements, all position NXP as the definitive silicon provider capable of single-handedly speeding the readiness and availability of the self-driving cars of tomorrow.”

In autonomous vehicles systems, multiple streams of sensor data are routed to the BlueBox engine, where they are fused to create a complete 360° world model around the vehicle. This functionality greatly improves car safety by both managing and preventing emergency situations. BlueBox and its connected secure smart solutions also incorporate the embedded intelligence and machine learning required for complete situational assessments, supporting advanced classification tasks, object detection, localisation, mapping and vehicle driving decisions.

Unlike closed systems focused only on vision or other single-sensor data streams, the NXP BlueBox engine for autonomous vehicles is an open-platform, Linux-based solution programmable in linear C language that automotive manufacturers can easily customise to their needs for optimal product differentiation.