Ambarella took home one of the two gold medals in the Embedded Computing category in the recently completed 2022 Leap Awards for product innovation.
The LEAP Awards celebrates the most innovative and forward-thinking products serving the design engineering space. Ambarella tied for the gold in the Embedded Computing category, which includes microcontrollers (MCUs) or microprocessors (MPUs) or other custom-designed chips, and supporting software in ROM (Read Only Memory) that comprise embedded computing. Also included are development tools and operating systems, computer boards, systems, and components, storage, and wired and wireless connectivity, including IoT and IIoT.
The fully scalable, power-efficient CVflow family of SoCs provides the automotive industry’s high AI processing performance, at up to 500 eTOPS, representing a 42x increase over Ambarella’s prior automotive family. Featuring up to 16 Arm-Cortex-A78AE CPU cores, the CV3 provides up to a 30x boost in CPU performance over the prior generation in support of autonomous vehicle (AV) software applications. This family enables centralized, single-chip processing for multi-sensor perception—including high-resolution vision, radar, ultrasonic, and lidar—as well as deep fusion for multiple sensor modalities and AV path planning. The result is robust ADAS and L2+ to Level 4 autonomous driving (AD) systems with greater levels of environmental perception in challenging lighting, weather and driving conditions for both driver viewing and machine perception.
“Our CV3 AI domain controller family is capable of running the full ADAS and AD stack with a single chip, while providing unprecedented performance and power efficiency,” said Fermi Wang, President and CEO of Ambarella. “Through enhancements to our on-chip ISP, along with simultaneous radar processing that can take advantage of our Oculii adaptive AI algorithms, Ambarella is helping the automotive industry unlock greater levels of perception accuracy across all environmental conditions to realize the promise of autonomous driving.”
The CV3 marked the debut of Ambarella’s next-generation CVflow architecture, which continues the company’s algorithm-first design philosophy. This drove the development of the on-chip neural vector processor (NVP), with up to 500 eTOPS of AI compute, industry-leading power efficiency and support for the latest advancements in neural network (NN) inferences. The NVP is also enhanced to run advanced radar perception software, such as the Oculii adaptive AI software algorithms. This is complemented by a new floating-point general vector processor (GVP) designed to offload classical computer vision and radar processing from the NVP engines, and floating-point-intensive algorithms from the Arm CPUs.
The CV3 family’s unique hardware scalability allows automakers to unify their software stacks across their entire retail portfolios, while reducing the cost and complexity of software development. This scalability directly addresses the rising complexity of automotive software by providing an alternative to the fragmented ADAS SoC offerings from competitors. Additionally, the CV3 family accelerates automakers’ development timelines while simplifying the deployment of new features by providing the headroom for a single, robust over-the-air (OTA) update implementation.
Leveraging a comprehensive set of mature software tools and a robust SDK, Ambarella’s flexible CVflow AI platform provides customers with an unprecedented opportunity to innovate and differentiate their products in the marketplace. To further expand this capability, Ambarella has cultivated a broad ecosystem of software partners for the CVflow platform, working closely with them to port and optimize their applications.
The CV3 also integrates Ambarella’s next-generation ISP, extending the company’s lead in image signal processing quality. By simultaneously supporting up to 12 physical or 20 virtual cameras, a single CV3 can process the entire sensor suite, which for typical L2+ deployments includes 10 cameras, five radar modules and numerous ultrasonic sensors. Additionally, higher-performance stereo and dense optical flow engines provide greater depth and motion perception.
Additional features of the new CV3 central domain controller family include:
- Automotive GPU for applications such as 3D surround-view rendering
- Hardware security module, enabling the isolation of different domains and secure software provisioning
- PCIe high-speed interfaces for ultra-low-latency communications
- Processing headroom for OTA software updates and testing software stacks in shadow mode
