Skip to main content

Highly automated driving ‘to spark adoption of centralised ADAS’

As vehicles become highly independent and 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, says ABI Research. This forces the industry to hit a hard reset on advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) architectures, currently dominated by distributed processing and smart sensors. Automotive OEMs will need to adopt new platforms based on powerful, centralised processors and high-speed low la
August 18, 2016 Read time: 2 mins
As vehicles become highly independent and 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, says 5725 ABI Research.

This forces the industry to hit a hard reset on advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) architectures, currently dominated by distributed processing and smart sensors. Automotive OEMs will need to adopt new platforms based on powerful, centralised processors and high-speed low latency networking. ABI Research forecasts 13 million vehicles with centralised ADAS platforms will ship in 2025.

James Hodgson, industry analyst at ABI Research, believes the distributed approach to ADAS systems will prove unsustainable as OEMs look to deliver highly automated driving around 2020. The new centralised ADAS architectures will unify sensing, processing, and actuation to deliver integrated decision-making for smooth path planning and effective collision avoidance.

This transition will present major opportunities for vendors new to the industry, as well as old incumbents, including NVIDIA, NXP, and Mobileye, who all announced centralised autonomous driving platforms. While each is in a different stage of development, all have common themes emerging, particularly in relation to processing power. The platforms average between eight and twelve teraflops (TFLOPs), a figure that is orders of magnitude beyond the typical smart sensor currently deployed in ADAS.

Physical separation of numerous dumb sensors and centralised processing will also open up opportunities for in-vehicle networking vendors. Ethernet-based solutions from vendors such as Marvell Semiconductor and Valens Semiconductor are well-positioned to meet the needs of high bandwidth and stringent automotive-grade requirements at a low cost.

"We are fast approaching the end of what can be achieved in automation within the confines of legacy architectures," concludes Hodgson. "While there are not yet any specific standards for centralised ADAS, it is interesting that three separate Tier 2s announced very similar platforms in quick succession. Vendors across the ecosystem need to take this time to plan accordingly in order to appropriately manage the industry transition toward centralised ADAS architectures."

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Continental and IBM collaborate on connected vehicles
    September 11, 2013
    Continental and IBM are to collaborate on the joint development of fully-connected mobile vehicle solutions for the world’s car manufacturers. Central to the agreement is development of a highly scalable cloud platform that will enable automotive manufacturers to deliver a range of new mobile in-car services. Software updates and vehicle control device functionality will be delivered over the internet, removing costly and inconvenient workshop visits. The companies feel the solution may equally prove be
  • Bombardier high speed train wins design awards in USA and Germany
    March 13, 2012
    Bombardier Transportation has won the iF Product Design Award as well as the Good Design Award for its ground-breaking very high speed (VHS) train currently being developed for leading railway markets in Europe, Asia and North America.
  • Four expansions added to Virginia’s Smart Road to test AVs in urban, rural and residential environments
    November 27, 2017
    The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute and the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDoT) has unveiled four expansions to the Virginia Smart Road to accelerate advanced-vehicle testing and explore how automated and autonomous vehicles (AVs) will function on U.S. roadways including edge-and-corner environments. Two new facilities have opened for testing: The Surface Street Expansion, an urban test bed, and the Live Roadway Connector, which connects the Smart road to the U.S. Route 460-Business,
  • Europe to lead insurance telematics market
    June 14, 2012
    The number of insurance telematics users in Europe will grow from 1.5 million in 2010 to 44 million in 2017, initially driven by the UK and Italy, according to ABI Research. Despite aggressive efforts from Progressive, North America will continue to lag behind the European UBI market, it says. Vice president and practice director Dominique Bonte comments, “While insurance telematics or usage based insurance (UBI) is far from a recent phenomenon, renewed interest in this market has been observed from both es