Driving the future of automotive technology GPUs, AI and connectivity
New technologies are revolutionising automotive, with innovation reshaping what it means to drive or be driven. The entire experience is being transformed with AI, compute, graphics and connectivity at the centre, creating a profound effect on the way we interact with our favourite vehicles.
The trends towards autonomy, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and electric powertrains, along with new business models such as mobility-as-a-service and robo-taxis will remake and remodel our perceptions of the automotive industry.
Imagination is at the forefront of this automotive revolution with our IP designs creating a smarter, safer and more exciting future.
As the leading GPU supplier in the automotive space, Imagination cores are the gold standard for automotive systems, providing unique technologies and capabilities. We have recently launched the XS family of GPUs: IP specifically designed for automotive silicon.
Our XS GPU IP range delivers an advanced feature set combined with a new safety architecture to accelerate ADAS and safety-critical graphics, creating the industry’s first ISO 26262-capable GPU IP. These cores also feature advanced safety mechanisms such as Tile Region Protection (TRP) to enable safety-critical rendering with higher performance than any alternate solution. These cores are the new standard for next-generation auto systems with additional performance optimisations for automotive workloads delivering higher performance and better visual quality.
XS family cores are available for licensing today.
We are at the forefront of autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) technology with disruptive solutions which deliver industry-leading performance for driver assistance, autonomy and machine learning. Our experience in artificial intelligence enables a step-change in capability for next-generation silicon.
Our XS GPU family and NNA IP are ideally suited to deliver high performance with full safety credentials for everything from advanced “auto cruise” capabilities all the way through to full self-driving. Our solutions have been designed to accelerate the algorithms of tomorrow, today, with a cohesive package of flexible GPU compute and rapid AI inference.
Our solutions are selected for their ability to deliver teraflops of compute and hundreds of TOPS of AI performance and rapid Ethernet connectivity while having been developed to ISO 26262 standards. Our unique AI Synergy feature provides a single programming interface for our technologies, enabling our partners to easily implement and extract full performance from our IP and deliver it straight to the road.
All Imagination cores are designed to help you, our partners, to move forward in capability and performance for ADAS, with industry-leading advanced technologies available right now.
Imagination is the leading supplier of technology for HMI solutions, with decades of experience powering infotainment and digital dashboards with our GPU IP. We’re seeing an explosion of multiple in-cabin displays, at 4K or 8K resolutions, with increasing graphical quality and higher frame rates. Auto vendors are leveraging the rich environment that a GPU provides to differentiate and deliver incredible visual experiences.
We are enabling this with our latest XS GPU family automotive IP to provide smoother frame delivery, crisper interaction and the highest rendering quality for a premium user experience. Our unique technologies, including hardware virtualization with Hyperlane Technology, enable our GPUs to drive multiple secure operating systems and multiple screens from a single hardware core, with full performance.
The latest automotive platforms in this space also incorporate our neural network accelerator IP, augmenting the compute capability of the GPU with higher machine learning performance for everything from in-car voice recognition to gesture control. More Imagination IP can be found at the boundaries between these systems where our Ethernet Packet Processor delivers quality of service for vital interconnects between platforms.
Tomorrow’s self-driving and driver-assisted (ADAS) car is a mobile computing platform with endless amounts of data streaming in real-time from sensors around the vehicle, feeding its AI brain. With petabytes of data passing to the AI decision-making units, connectivity is critical, as sensitive data needs to be routed around the vehicle securely and safely.
The advent of over-the-air (OTA) updates and V2X (vehicle to anything) data communications also requires sophisticated data handoffs – for instance, when your car is garaged or outside your home it will be talking to the Cloud to obtain the latest software, maps and safety functionality. In turn, it may be uploading journey and component status to the Cloud and then to the manufacturer’s data centre.
This requires the sophisticated connectivity provided by Imagination’s Ethernet solutions – multi-gigabit switches and routers that address the need for fast, high-bandwidth communications around the car, while interfacing with multiple communications protocols.
Designed with functional safety in mind, these solutions will make it easier for SoC manufacturers to achieve the automotive safety integrity levels (ASIL) that are classified by the ISO 26262 standard for automotive safety.
Automotive requires heterogeneous compute solutions: CPU, GPU, NNA and networking. The IMG Series4 NNA thus forms part of Imagination’s three-pronged approach to automotive solutions.
Low-power multi-core GPUs with unprecedented performance and the industry’s first to be built using ISO 26262 certifiable processes.
Performance-ceiling busting low-power, low-area neural network accelerators that brings the automotive industry the performance it needs to enable true self-driving.
Advanced, low-power, high-performance networking to enable next-gen automotive solutions.
Over many generations, we have driven progress in the automotive industry with continued advances in hardware capabilities. However, the key to leveraging that new hardware today lies in having great software and a rich ecosystem of partners and tools readily available and optimised for our cores.
With our IP you will benefit from the years of optimisation and development that have been undertaken for our previous, and now industry-standard products.
We partner with the leading providers in the fields of automotive UI/UX design, OS and RTOS providers, automotive safety testing bodies and more, to ensure our customers and those developing on our systems get the highest performance and the best user experience for the millions of drivers using our systems every day.
Imagination has over fifteen years of leadership in automotive solutions with an established track record of meeting automotive requirements for robustness, reliability and traceability. In recent years Imagination has worked with leading automotive safety bodies to go beyond product certification with full process certification covering every step from conception to delivery across our full product line. This capability means the processes and traceability are in place to enable our customers to achieve their goals for ISO 26262 and ASIL SoC implementations.
Our IP is licensed by multiple leading automotive applications processor vendors, giving us a market share of over 50%.
Imagination automotive is a complete product pack consisting of five essential elements: hardware IP, software, tools, documentation, and long-term support.
Automotive specific performance points and support for dual GPU.
Long-term support for fixed software versions and OEMs.
Bought a new gaming console or PC graphics card recently? You may be responsible for someone else wait for the brand-new car they wanted. While these things may seem unrelated on the surface, they are in fact connected by the realities of global manufacturing and supply and demand.
The past has a habit of making promises that the future struggles to keep. By 2001, we were supposed to be encountering black monoliths around the orbit of Saturn, but, in reality, we’re only just getting close to returning to the moon after a 50-year absence. Where we were going, we were supposed not to need roads, but in reality, the only flying cars we have are the ones that took a wrong turn off a cliff because the driver was slavishly looking at the sat nav instead of looking out of the window. The 1980s, of course, gave us KITT, the four-wheeled, driverless, talking Knight Rider car and with a rumoured film remake in the works, this is still something that fascinates us. Of course, while we can talk at our cars, they don’t yet talk back – but the driverless thing? Well, that is certainly on the cards.
What does the impending EV revolution mean for companies that create semiconductor electronics IP? We speak to several key executives at Imagination to discuss what this transition to EV means for suppliers of automotive GPU and AI IP.
July 8, 2020
In the session, we will explore the features and capabilities of this new automotive range and look at some of the advanced technologies that deliver up to 2x higher performance than competing solutions while executing safety-critical workloads.
February 21, 2019
This webinar, will introduce PowerVR’s unique hardware virtualization technology, explain the benefits of this solution, it’s exceptional automotive robustness features and outline the latest version of this solution.
December 13, 2018
This webinar, we will explore key market drivers, issues facing the industry, where we are in the move towards fully autonomous driving, Imagination’s automotive roadmap (GPU and AI), PowerVR automotive initiative and applications in the digital dash, ADAS and autonomous vehicles.
© Imagination Technologies Limited. All rights reserved.
Privacy Policy Quality Policy Terms & Conditions Trademarks Cookies