Making surround-view technology more widely available

Car manufacturers want to bring the most basic surround-view features into their entry and mid-range vehicles, and place advanced systems featuring automation on their higher-end and luxury models. Ideally, manufacturers could offer their customers some continuity among the systems – with a familiar look and feel to each – and the ability to upgrade the level of features through simple hardware or software changes.

A scalable implementation represents a challenge for Tier-1 manufacturers and their SoC vendors, however. Many SoC vendors offer solutions for only part of the equation – a simple SoC with camera input and visualization capabilities but no capability for analytics, or a system capable of automation that is expensive, power-hungry and impractical for lesser uses.

Manufacturers have no choice but to branch their development efforts into different systems, resulting in duplicated effort, higher development costs and no simple way to maintain continuity across a vehicle line-up.

There are some things an SoC vendor can do to address these challenges. Taking a holistic view of surround-view and parking applications, it becomes an issue of delivering scale: a greater number of sensors, more processing and memory for algorithms, and a way to incorporate safety as applications evolve. Given the range of requirements, one device can’t be the answer, but a family of devices could be. Such a device family should:

·         Be built around extensive application and use-case modeling, ensuring an understanding of corner cases and how to best balance resources.

·         Aggressively use acceleration for routine but computationally intensive tasks.

·         Make smart use of processing cores that are best tuned to the specific job required (graphics, video encoding, neural network processing, computer vision processing, safety).

·         Efficiently use memory to minimize power consumption and component count while meeting performance needs.

·         Maintain common processor cores, accelerators, inputs/outputs, and memory system and chip infrastructures across the family of products to maximize reuse.

·         Deliver a common software kit that is optimized for the device components and guarantees reuse of developed software assets.

A family of SoCs built with these principles can help realize this vision, but it’s not easily done.  A history of providing technology into ADAS markets is necessary. Collaboration with manufacturers through generations of systems builds the appreciation for subtle technical problems that occur in implementation.

This simplified block diagram show’s TI’s Jacinto TDA4VM processor in a surround-view use case showing video and other sensor input, display output and access to storage for compressed video files.

This allows an understanding where time is lost in development cycles and reveals the things that can be done to improve efficiency in system development. This collaboration also provides the insight necessary to anticipate the next set of challenges, and design devices and software that are ready. The combination of technology and system expertise will enable cars to be smarter and less stressful to operate, and help make our roads and parking lots safer as a result.