Qualcomm goes up a gear in driver assistance and autonomous driving

Indicating how its automotive technology portfolio is gaining further momentum, Qualcomm Technologies has revealed accelerated adoption of its Snapdragon Ride Platform from leading global automotive companies that are rapidly developing safe and updateable advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and automated driving (AD) solutions.

Specifically, the first-generation of the Snapdragon Ride platforms are currently available in commercial vehicles across the globe, while the next-generation platforms are built with a 4nm (nanometer) system-on-chip (SoC) and integrated Snapdragon Ride Vision stack to support safety-critical systems through to comfort. ADAS functions are now sampling with all major Tier 1 suppliers, targeting 2025 global production vehicles.

Snapdragon Ride platforms form a key pillar of the Snapdragon Digital Chassis solution, which is designed to allow automakers to meet evolving consumer and enterprise demand for a connected, intelligent experience that is safer, smarter and more immersive.

At the same time, the technology is seeing use in examining opportunities for deeper customer engagement and service-based business models based on a scalable hardware-software co-designed architecture.

In addition, Snapdragon Ride Platforms are claimed to comprise one of the automotive industry’s most advanced, scalable and customisable automated driving SoC family, and are designed to help global automakers and Tier 1 suppliers produce safe, power-efficient and thermally optimised ADAS and AD solutions.

Having worked closely with safety experts across the automotive ecosystem, Qualcomm believes the platforms are designed and assessed to meet the highest levels of automotive safety. Additionally, the Snapdragon Ride platforms are engineered to allow for customisation, with the ability to adapt to evolving automotive architectures, and to be augmented by dedicated artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators to support an expanding ADAS/AD operational design domain (ODD).

Snapdragon Ride platforms also serve as turnkey solutions that support multimodal sensors, including cameras, radars, lidars, AD maps and ultrasonic sensors. Qualcomm believes automakers can differentiate their solutions by utilising the modules from the Snapdragon Ride Autonomous Driving stack with the Snapdragon Ride Vision system on Tier 1 hardware platforms that feature separate software stacks, such as parking and driver monitoring systems.

Aiding Tier 1 suppliers and automakers in their rapid development of next-generation ADAS and AD solutions is the Snapdragon Ride Software Development Kit (SDK), which is designed to provide a hardware and software environment to empower Tier 1 suppliers and automakers with the ability to enhance their own drive policy stack and integrate components, including parking software, driver monitoring systems, additional sensor processing for lidars and radars, and augmented reality solutions that can be integrated into the Snapdragon Ride Vision System. The Snapdragon Ride SDK also includes an end-to-end data management and toolchain ecosystem, allowing for simulation and machine learning in the cloud.

“As the industry’s only scalable and open system designed for ADAS and AD, we are pleased with the steady momentum our Snapdragon Ride Platforms have had since their introduction in 2020,” said Nakul Duggal, senior vice-president and general manager, automotive, at Qualcomm Technologies.

“We attribute the success of our Snapdragon Ride Platforms to the strong relationships and collaborations we have with automakers and Tier 1 ecosystem, and look forward to our continued efforts to innovate together to advance the industry’s efforts in delivering safe and secure ADAS and AD systems.”

Qualcomm also revealed that it was introducing Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC, engineered to support mixed-criticality workloads across heterogenous compute resources, allowing for the digital cockpit, ADAS and AD functions to co-exist on a single SoC. Designed to meet high levels of automotive safety, the Flex SoC enables a hardware architecture to support isolation, freedom from interference and quality of service for specific ADAS functions. It comes equipped with a dedicated Automotive Safety Integrity Level D safety island.

Pre-integrated with the Snapdragon Ride Vision stack, the Flex SoC pre-integrates a software platform that supports multi-operating system operations concurrently, hypervisor enablement with isolated virtual machines and real-time operating system with an automotive open system architecture to meet mixed-criticality workload requirements for driver assistance safety systems, digital reconfigurable clusters, infotainment systems, driver monitoring systems and park-assist systems.