Continental integrates scalable AI-based system-on-chip on ADAS systems

Continental plans to offer Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) solutions based on the ‘CV3’ artificial intelligence (AI) system-on-chip (SoC) family from semiconductor company Ambarella, in the future.

The high-performance, power efficient and scalable SoC portfolio, which is built for ADAS applications, complements Continental’s solutions for assisted driving and further advances vehicle automation. The more sensors are installed in a vehicle, the greater the amount of data collected to detect the environment.

The joint solution with a centralised single-chip processing based on 5 nanometer technology enables the next generation of vehicles to process the environment perception of multiple sensors even quicker thanks to an increasing performance level. Sensor solutions include high-resolution cameras, radars, lidars as well as ultrasonic sensors. The integrated SoC enables early data fusion, in which the information from different sensors is superimposed simultaneously for various modalities such as emergency brake assist, parking or cruising.

“After exchanging on different use cases with Ambarella for two years, Continental is now integrating its high-performance, low latency, and low-power processing chipset into our assisted driving solutions. This brings our ADAS systems to the next level and helps to serve the growing amount of sensor data in the vehicle. With this, we achieve a more comprehensive and accurate environment perception,” says Frank Petznick, Head of the Autonomous Mobility Business Area at Continental. “We have now combined our expertise in this field to offer an enhanced level of systems performance as well as scalable solutions required by the market.”

Significant impact for industry and degree of vehicle automation
According to Continental, its ADAS enhanced with Ambarella's SoCs can process more collected data faster. In this way, they increase precision and enable a larger range of functions. The high scalability of the system-on-chip family allows vehicle manufacturers to choose the necessary performance level for their system requirements on the same vehicle architecture.

Despite the higher performance and accuracy, the solution consumes less power. This leads also to fewer cooling efforts, making sustainable energy savings possible, while also reducing system costs. An added value to vehicle manufacturers to reduce their engineering investments across all vehicle types.

Unique system-on-chip performance with low power consumption
Ambarella’s fully scalable, power efficient family of system-on-chips provides significant AI performance per watt for neural network computation, with a performance increase of over 40 times compared to its former semiconductor chip family. Additionally, Ambarella integrates its image signal processor technology into all SoCs. This results in robust ADAS systems with higher levels of environmental perception in challenging lighting, weather and driving conditions for both machine and human vision.

The integrated system-on-chip in Continental’s ADAS systems will be showcased at CES 2023 in Las Vegas for the first time.