Each year in the U.S. there are 28,800 traffic related deaths, resulting in almost $563 billion in expenses. Drivers average roughly 3 million braking decisions over a 25 year period, and it takes only one mistake to cause a fatal accident.
Texas Instruments (TI) hopes to reduce the number of vehicle collisions with today’s announcement of the newest member of the automotive system-on-a-chip (SoC) family, the TDA3x solution. The TDA3x family is intended to aid car manufacturers in developing refined advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) applications that reduce vehicular accidents.
“One of the main goals of the TDA family is to take advanced ADAS functionality and put that into mid and entry level vehicles,” says Brooke Williams, TI ADAS Business Manager. “The goal was to make an affordable, yet very powerful processor.”
The TDA3x extends scalability from the TDA2x devices on front camera, surround view, and fusion application, with the addition of smart rear camera and radar.
“Our customers that have made investments in TDA2x for front camera in high-end vehicles, for instance, can use those same algorithms in an entry level car as well,” explains Williams.
The new rear camera feature aims to add intelligence with a new processor. If the camera recognizes an object or pedestrian, it sends a signal to the brakes to automatically stop the vehicle, even if the driver isn’t paying attention to the screen.
The radar feature is similar, and allows car manufacturers to enable short-, mid-, and long-range radar in their vehicles. The TDA3x family supports a wide variety of ADAS algorithms such as pedestrian detection, autonomous emergency braking, forward collision warning, lane keep assist, adaptive cruise control, traffic sign recognition, and back over prevention.
“Our architecture is really set up to enable more autonomous features,” Brooke explains. “As ADAS systems take more control of the vehicle, the safety related functionality of these devices, and the systems themselves continue to increase. Therefore, we’ve added a lot of new safety support in terms of hardware.”
The TDA3x includes TI’s fixed and floating-point duel TMS320C66x generation of DSP cores, programmable Vision AccelerationPac containing an Embedded Vision Engine (EVE), dual ARM Cortex-M4 cores, and an image signal processor (ISP). The integration of ISP also enables customers to use lower cost image sensors and eliminates the need for an external ISP component.
In addition, the automotive industry’s first package-on-package (PoP) is introduced in the TDA3x Soc. Memory and flash can be mounted on top of the package to reduce footprint and complexity.
“Smaller and smarter used to be a trade off. If you wanted a smaller system, you couldn’t add a lot of intelligence to it.” says Williams. “But now with the TDA3x, the PoP package, and ISP integration, you can really create a very small, low-power package that’s got a lot of intelligence and a lot of analytics capabilities to make systems smarter and safer.”
Today, TI also announced the addition of signal processing to its new DRA75x processors, the Jacinto 6 EP and Jacinto 6 Ex. This addition will allow customers to augment infotainment and pair informational ADAS features.
“We’re using parts of the safety ADAS innovations as innovations for our informational ADAS system,” explains Cyril Clocher, TI Infotainment Processors Marketing Manager.
The Jacinto 6 EP, with 1.4 GHz of digital signal processor, allows a single processor to run radio, audio, and image manipulation, while running traditional in-vehicle infotainment features.
The Jacinto 6 Ex offers two embedded vision engines (EVEs) for concurrent informational ADAS and infotainment functionalities. Informational ADAS ranges from augmented reality navigation to pedestrian detection using cameras inside and outside the car without actually controlling the vehicle.
“Because we have extended the Jacinto 6 family and enabled ADAS integration with infotainment, customers can now reduce the number of devices and the overall system level cost,” says Williams. “And with the TDA3x, we are one step closer to vehicle autonomy and fewer vehicle-related deaths.”
For more information, visit www.ti.com.
