The Road Ahead for SoCs in Self-Driving Vehicles

Automakers have relied on a human driver behind the wheel for more than a century. With Level 3 systems in place, the road ahead leads to full autonomy and Level 5 self-driving. However, it’s going to be a long climb. Much of the technology that got the industry to Level 3 will not scale in all the needed dimensions—performance, memory usage, interconnect, chip area, and power consumption.

This paper looks at the challenges waiting down the road, including increasing AI operations while decreasing power consumption in realizable solutions. It introduces a new, scalable neural processing technology based on co-designed hardware and software IP for customized, heterogeneous SoCs that can help solve them.