Auto Industry Needs to Focus on Shift to Centralized ADAS Platforms, Says ABI

With the age of autonomous vehicles approaching, the automotive industry needs to “hit a hard reset” on advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) architectures, said an ABI Research report Wednesday. As independent vehicles begin to drive and react to traffic on their own, autonomous systems will aggregate and process data from a variety of on-board sensors and connected infrastructure, said ABI. Automotive OEMs will need to shift from distributed processing and smart sensors and adopt new platforms based on powerful, centralized processors and high-speed low latency networking, it said. ABI forecasts 13 million vehicles with centralized ADAS platforms will ship in 2025. “The new centralized ADAS architectures will unify sensing, processing, and actuation to deliver integrated decision-making for smooth path planning and effective collision avoidance,” said analyst James Hodgson, a shift that will begin around 2020. Benefiting from the transition will be vendors new to the industry and veterans including Nvidia, NXP and Mobileye, which all have announced centralized autonomous driving platforms, said the industry research firm. Companies are in different stages of development, but all with common themes in relation to processing power, said Hodgson. The platforms average between eight and 12 teraflops, “orders of magnitude beyond the typical smart sensor currently deployed in ADAS,” he said. Physical separation of dumb sensors and centralized processing also will create opportunities for in-vehicle networking vendors, and Ethernet-based solutions from Marvell Semiconductor and Valens Semiconductor are positioned to meet the needs of high bandwidth and stringent automotive-grade requirements at a low cost, he said. “We are fast approaching the end of what can be achieved in automation within the confines of legacy architectures.” Three separate tier-two suppliers announced “very similar platforms in quick succession,” he said, saying no standards exist for centralized ADAS. Vendors across the ecosystem need to “appropriately manage the industry transition toward centralized ADAS architectures,” he said.