Automotive Design and Production

OCT 2013

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AD&P; > October 2013 > FEATURE > Processors for Superior Performance in Automotive Apps > Gary S. Vasilash > gsv@autofeldguide.com Processors for suPerior Performance in automotive aPPs In the race to deploy more electronics-based systems, faster is better. And the processors from NVIDIA are awfully quick. Danny Shapiro drives a 2011 Nissan LEAF. He charges it from the solar panels on his house in northern California. He says he likes the car. But there is a bit of a problem. "Even though the car is maintenance-free, I have to take it into the dealer to get a software update that is going to change the distance-to-empty algorithm," he says, adding, "It's ironic that a connected car still needs to be brought in to get a software update." an Audi? Or interacted with the 17-inch touchscreen in a Tesla Model S? Those OEMs, as well as an array of others, are using NVIDIA technology, specifcally Tegra mobile processors, to drive the in-vehicle infotainment and digital instrument clusters. The Tegra processor, which is the size of your thumbnail, uses four CPU cores and an additional ffth processing unit to handle lowlevel tasks. What this means is that Shapiro knows more than most people about automotive electronics, hardware and software alike. He's director of Automotive for NVIDIA Corp. (nvidia. com). NVIDIA, based in Santa Clara, California, is the company that invented the GPU—the graphics processing unit—in 1999. Graphics processing is highly data intensive, whether it is for gaming, computer-aided design, or creating special efects for movies. Work in this area has led the company to develop products like the Kepler GPU, which includes seven billion transistors. NVIDIA developers created CUDA, a computer platform and programming model for parallel processing. q The Tegra processor from NVIDIA is based on tech used for graphics-intensive applications like games, which means that renderings on screens are high fdelity. Auto applications today tend to be for infotainment, but advanced driver assistance system implementations such as vision processing aren't far in the future. So what's this have to do with cars? Have you ever seen Google Earth and StreetView displayed on the screen in 46 not only is there the power to render high-fdelity images (they can render at 120 Hz, which is twice what a typical video monitor operates at), but even the ability to use each of the four CPUs for individual tasks. Navigation, infotainment, climate control, and driver assistance could all be handled by one of these chips at the same time, although it is more likely that there would be the use of a separate processor for advanced driver assistance operations, because having the collision avoidance system suddenly go out because something went wrong with the rear-seat entertainment system would not be ideal. Philip Hughes, NVIDIA vice president of Automotive Sales and Business Development, explains, "Theoretically, there is enough horsepower within Tegra to run an infotainment system and, in parallel, to run some ADAS [advanced driver assistance system] functionality as we have four ARM Cortex-A15 CPUs running hypervisor [a virtualization manager] running on two separate systems. Some OEMs and Tier Ones are concerned and want a frewall, so we would have two Tegras, one for ADAS and one for infotainment."

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