OpenCL ADAS development environment addresses safety concerns

14th January 2015

Barney Scott

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With today’s Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), the “self-driving car” concept has captured the world’s imagination. But the enormous opportunities presented come with significant challenges to be solved. Freescale aims to address two critical speed bumps on the path toward autonomous driving - the lack of open standards for ADAS system development, and the debatable premise that consumer-focused silicon chips are safe enough for safety-critical autonomous applications.

Freescale has announced it will soon introduce an Open Computing Language (OpenCL)-based automotive development environment, engineered to open the market for car OEMs and tier-one suppliers alike to bring advanced driver assist and other ADAS technologies to a wider range of vehicles. The company also called on tier-one ADAS system providers and their suppliers to renew their industry-wide commitment to automotive safety via the design and deployment of highly secure embedded semiconductors built from the ground up to meet and exceed automotive-grade quality requirements.

Responding to the current lack of open standards, and to reverse the trend toward closed, proprietary ADAS systems which inhibit development and stifle design innovation, Freescale will offer an OpenCL development environment for ADAS systems targeting Freescale silicon and engineered to reduce R&D overhead - aiming to democratise the ADAS development process. OpenCL is an open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming, improving speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous markets. OpenCL is an open standard maintained by the non-profit technology consortium Khronos Group.

Despite the increasing publicity surrounding them, autonomous vehicles will simply not exist on a commercial scale without safe, reliable and secure solutions. Freescale believes that the assertion that consumer-oriented silicon solutions designed to enhance gaming graphics or run smartphone apps are safe enough to ensure autonomous driving-quality and reliability in automotive applications presents significant risk to the automotive industry. Such claims are perpetuating a hype cycle that is dissociating reality from the vision of self-driving technology.

Freescale designs products specifically for a long life of fail-safe operation in the harshest automotive environments. The company’s SafeAssure Functional Safety Program offers a broad solution set of MCUs, sensors and analog ICs, as well as support for functional safety application design that includes training, safety documentation and technical support. Freescale’s Qorivva MPC5643L was the industry’s first MCU to achieve a formal ISO 26262 certificate for ASIL D functional safety capability by an independent third-party accredited certification body.

“An open standards development environment and zero-defect design methodologies will form the foundation for Freescale’s next-gen ADAS platforms,” said Bob Conrad, SVP and General Manager, Automotive MCUs, Freescale. “Incorporating OpenCL to our portfolio of automotive processing solutions is expected to free our customers to focus more on ADAS innovation, and more importantly, ADAS safety.”

“The existential threat to the self-driving car is safety,” added Luca De Ambroggi, Principal Analyst, Automotive Semiconductors, IHS. “We are seeing a lot of entrants to this market with consumer silicon which may pass some safety tests, but is not specifically designed for automotive safety from the ground up. If your graphics processor goes out, that’s one thing; but if your front end sensors, radar and brakes fail, that’s a different story.”