NXP Semiconductors demoed its BlueBox engine for self-driving car using NXP silicon and software solutions at each ADAS node. The system useds BlueBox central computing engine with radar, lidar, and vision sensing, as well as an onboard secure V2X system.
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, localization, 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 customize to their needs for optimal product differentiation.
The BlueBox engine incorporates NXP’s S32V automotive vision processor, as well as the company’s LS2088A embedded compute processor, which is among the highest performing embedded products ever developed for the performance-hungry networking market. The LS2088A processor integrates eight 64-bit ARM Cortex-A72 cores running at 2 GHz, along with specialized accelerators, high performance communications interfaces, DDR4 memory controllers for extremely low latency, and more. The result is an exceptionally high-performance solution, providing BlueBox with 90,000 DMIPS (million instructions per second) of performance at under 40 Watts of power, thereby eliminating the need for fans, liquid cooling or other exotic thermal management componentry. The S32V processor includes graphics engines, dedicated high performing image processing accelerators, as well as state-of-the-art sensor fusion functionality, high-performance ARM cores and advanced APEX image processing. Together, these NXP processors can power the autonomous car of the future, today.
NXP introduced 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.