How can one platform meet the differentiated needs of the digital cockpit?

alan000345 · Published on 2018-10-29 09:23

How can one platform meet the differentiated needs of the digital cockpit? [Copy link]

When it comes to the "gold mine" of automobiles, it is inevitable that they cannot do without the support of intelligence and networking. These two major outlets have driven the rise of intelligent digital cockpits represented by infotainment systems, digital instruments, and ADAS. This requires the integration of multi-screen interaction and advanced human-computer interaction and ADAS functions, as well as cost optimization, software reuse or accelerated time to market. A unified "platform" is needed to take on the heavy responsibility. So the question is, what kind of platform solution can "do ten things at once" so that it can not only bring differentiation, but also help customers focus on reuse, provide scalability, and balance time to market and overall economic benefits.

Moving towards digital cockpit integration To answer this question, we must understand the market demand. Regarding the automotive infotainment system that has always emphasized entertainment, Ding Ding, the application manager of application processor technology at the semiconductor division of Texas Instruments, believes that this market has gradually moved towards digital cockpit integration, aiming to bring a more intelligent and safe interactive experience.

At the digital instrument level, "It can be seen that today's traditional mechanical analog instruments are transitioning to 12.3-inch 1920×720 digital instruments, which is a major industry trend." Ding Ding said. This judgment is based on a set of figures: Since 2015, the entire industry has gradually increased its demand for digital instruments. China's digital instruments using TI automotive processors began mass production in 2017, and the assembly rate has increased very quickly. The entire 12.The 3-inch digital instrument panel industry is progressing rapidly. In addition, digital instruments are also required to meet the ISO26262 ASIL- B safety standard, which puts forward corresponding reliability requirements for chips and software architectures. ADAS products, as the "outpost" of driverless driving, have been developed and invested for more than ten years, but the new challenge for the industry is how to transition to the level of autonomous driving Level 3+. It should be noted that the application of infotainment systems, digital instruments and ADAS will involve artificial intelligence (AI) in a broad sense, including deep learning, pattern recognition, radar processing, etc. Therefore, the requirements for platform solutions mentioned above are naturally "rising with the tide". "Unique skills" to meet the needs of digital instruments TI, which has accumulated decades of experience in this field, continues the advantages of the previous "Jacinto 6" series of system-on-chip (SoC) and launches two major families, DRAx and TDAx.

DRAx is designed to provide feature-rich in-vehicle infotainment systems, instrument clusters and telematics functions, equipped with ARM Cortex-A15 cores, DSP, image processing accelerators, etc. and powerful support for advanced operating systems such as Linux, QNX and Android. Since it is well prepared, it naturally has "unique skills". TI's DRAx provides a series of optimized performance and features, and the overall advantages are well known to Ding Ding. First, high performance. In instrument applications with high graphics requirements, the refresh rate reaches 60FPS, and can even be as high as 110FPS. Second, TI's unique chip architecture can support security and reliability requirements. There are independent systems running on multiple cores, and the cores can play a role of backup and verification. In addition, it also provides protection for areas with the highest reliability requirements, such as telltale. Because TI's chip architecture can ensure more reliable and high-real-time hardware units to refresh and draw speed information, gear information, etc., this is beyond the reach of traditional general-purpose processors. Third, good scalability. From economical to high-end, the same software and hardware system of the TI J6 family can support the needs of car manufacturers for digital instrument applications from now to the next 3-5 years. TI does not stop there. Ding Ding said that TI sees that the customer base of digital instruments is becoming more and more diverse. Under this trend, TI has made the hardware and software more applicable and easier to use for applications. As a result, TI's high-complete solution is easy for users to quickly develop at the software and hardware levels, and can be easily "played" by customers from entry-level to senior. ADAS's "Triple" Choice As ADAS continues to move from niche to mass, and from several independent functions to integration, panoramic surround view is also increasingly used. The panoramic development of the Asian automotive market is very prominent, especially in the Chinese market. TI has also seen several key trends from this. Ding Ding explained that the first is that visual quality is gradually improving. More advanced systems can achieve seamless stitching of higher-resolution views, making the bird's-eye view more realistic and accurate. The second is video noise reduction, which requires the use of advanced video noise reduction algorithms to reduce image quality interference and improve the quality of the surround view. The third is to improve the distortion of objects near the car. Current surround view systems will also stretch or produce artifacts when rendering such objects, but more advanced algorithms will reduce such distortions in the future and make the output video look more realistic. Fourth, intelligent algorithms are added to the surround view to detect certain specific events and alert the driver in an emergency. In line with the trend, TDAx, another major family of Jacinto series automotive processors, is based on ADAS applications and uses its long family history to "pass the test" and provide full-featured graphics, imaging, video and visual acceleration processing capabilities, including two sub-families, TDA2 and TDA3. The TDAx family is mainly divided into three categories for the Chinese ADAS panoramic market. Ding Ding introduced that the first category is the high-end series TDA 2Plus, which adds many recognition functions such as APA automatic parking realized by combining image recognition technology, and provides a large number of image analysis libraries and deep learning development kits. In addition to 2 million surround views, ultrasonic functions are also integrated. TI's DSP technology can dynamically identify the distance of obstacles and generate the most suitable model in real time, which greatly changes the dilemma that the results of different distances will be enlarged or reduced when there are obstacles. ; The second category is the cost-effective version TDA2E. In response to the growing demand for driving records in the Chinese automotive industry, the TI China team has further improved the cost-effectiveness of the TDA2E chip and added a four-way high-definition driving record function to help users build a new form of panoramic solution. In the solution, all image sizes are not cropped or frame rate reduced, and 3D panoramic surround can be recorded and supported simultaneously on the basis of the original four-way fisheye camera. The third category is the TDA3 ultra-low-cost high-definition surround solution, which uses TI's unique hardware unit to achieve the surround effect, and launches a complete software and hardware productization solution for the Chinese market, which can help customers quickly install it on the actual vehicle. You should know that in the past 4-5 years, TI has invested a lot of local support in China, and has taken the lead in entering the panoramic field according to customer needs. When using CVBS and analog camera technology in the standard definition era, TI already had solutions to serve Chinese panoramic users. When switching from standard definition to high definition market, TI still occupies a leading position in the market with its accumulated panoramic user base. The “maturity and evolution” of the platform The reason why TI’s Jacinto 6 platform can be used in digital cockpits is not only because of its complete and perfect automotive processor solution, but also because it has reached the level of completeness and maturity that can be quickly mass-produced, which is also due to its own continuous evolution. The biggest feature of the platform is multi-core heterogeneity, which can allocate different tasks to the cores in a single chip that are most suitable for certain specific tasks. Ding Ding said that multi-core heterogeneity can realize car machine solutions with different structures, support 1920×720 3D digital instrument and support 1920×1080 full HD size infotainment system. Digital instrument and infotainment system using Android use different operating systems. TI can isolate them at the operating system level by using hardware virtualization technology, so that they do not interfere with each other and achieve safety and reliability. Obviously, compared with traditional customized ASIC, TI's SoC has significant advantages in openness and flexibility. Moreover, TI's automotive processors not only support system integration using virtualization technology, but also provide solutions for multi-screen system integration such as instrument panels and car computers without using virtualization technology to meet the needs of low-cost system integration of some car manufacturers in the Chinese market. Ding Ding introduced that the difference between the two is that TI uses MPU to implement the Android O standard interface and isolates the hardware unit inside the chip, which is equivalent to supporting Android for human-computer interaction on traditional ARM and GPU cores, and implementing instrument functions on cores such as DSP and Cortex-M4. "Because it is a multi-functional integration, users are most worried about mutual interference between hardware. For example, if Android is stuck, how can we not affect the application of instrument panels and videos? In this regard, TI has formed a unique and effective solution through its unique hardware structure." Ding Ding emphasized. Power consumption is another major advantage. Because TI assigns different tasks to the most suitable core or the most economical core, it does not rely entirely on ARM or GPU. In addition, TI chips have ISP, DSP, graphics accelerators, etc., which are all very low-power IPs. Therefore, TI chips have excellent overall power consumption performance, including infotainment and digital instruments, which do not require fans, and only the outer shell can conduct heat. In terms of cost, which is concerned by the industry, it is also very competitive. Ding Ding mentioned that this SoC does not require a GPU because it uses some unique TI hardware accelerators to achieve 3D functions. At the same time, the chip integrates TI's ISP, which can greatly save the original independent ISP cost for the camera. Therefore, it is not only smaller in size, but also has a large saving in the entire system BOM including PCB. The completeness and maturity of a platform are inseparable from the "support" of software, and TI has also done enough "homework" in this regard. "If TI's SoC only provides hardware and allows users to write software from scratch, it must be very difficult. But the advantage of TI chips is that there are corresponding SDKs for infotainment systems, digital instruments, and ADAS. The SDK has a reference framework, applications, and code. Users can easily process data between different cores without performing low-level programming, and ensure high performance, synchronization, and low latency. In this way, users can spend more time studying algorithms and applications, and TI will also provide corresponding support to optimize algorithms and applications to the most suitable operation for the hardware platform." Ding Ding emphasized.

O standard interface, and isolate the hardware unit inside the chip, which is equivalent to supporting Android for human-computer interaction on traditional ARM and GPU cores, and realizing instrument functions on cores such as DSP and Cortex-M4. "Because it is a multi-functional integration, users are most worried about the interference between hardware. For example, if Android is stuck, how can we not affect the application of instruments and videos? In this regard, TI has formed a unique and effective solution through its unique hardware structure." Ding Ding emphasized. Power consumption is another major advantage. Because TI assigns different tasks to the most suitable core or the most economical core, it does not rely entirely on ARM or GPU. In addition, TI chips have ISP, DSP, graphics accelerators, etc., which are all very low-power IPs. Therefore, TI chips have excellent overall power consumption performance, including infotainment and digital instruments, which do not require fans, and only the outer shell can conduct heat. In terms of cost, which is concerned by the industry, it is also very competitive. Ding Ding mentioned that this SoC does not require a GPU because it uses some unique TI hardware accelerators to achieve 3D functions. At the same time, the chip integrates TI's ISP, which can greatly save the original independent ISP cost for the camera. Therefore, it is not only smaller in size, but also has a large saving in the entire system BOM including PCB. The completeness and maturity of a platform are inseparable from the "support" of software, and TI has also done enough "homework" in this regard. "If TI's SoC only provides hardware and allows users to write software from scratch, it must be very difficult. But the advantage of TI chips is that there are corresponding SDKs for infotainment systems, digital instruments, and ADAS. The SDK has a reference framework, applications, and code. Users can easily process data between different cores without performing low-level programming, and ensure high performance, synchronization, and low latency. In this way, users can spend more time studying algorithms and applications, and TI will also provide corresponding support to optimize algorithms and applications to the most suitable operation for the hardware platform." Ding Ding emphasized.