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

  • ITS America publishes connected vehicle guidance
    April 22, 2015
    Guidance on the likely impact of multipath communications on connected vehicle development has been published by ITS America. ITS America’s Connected Vehicle Technical Insight looks at the challenges and opportunities wireless interoperability could provide in vehicle applications. In particular the 22-page document examines the processes by which data can be transferred from one vehicle to another (V2V), or between a vehicle and the infrastructure (V2I).
  • ITS in the Nordic states
    April 7, 2021
    Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden are quietly embracing advanced traffic technologies.
  • Trends in automotive technology
    March 14, 2012
    Continental has become a leading player in vehicle technology and telematics. The firm’s executive board chairman Elmar Degenhart describes to Jason Barnes Continental’s views on the ‘megatrends’ of the automotive industry Strategic moves to diversify Continental’s business from rubber-related products began in the late 1990s with the acquisition of ITT Teves and its brake business. This brought on board know-how relating to the then new electronic stability control (ESC) systems which today form an import
  • Developments in smarter multi-modal fare paynment
    February 2, 2012
    This section pulls together all the multi-modal topics in each issue. Subject matter will include smartcards; ticketing and payment systems; passenger information systems; fleet management for buses, trains and light rail; park and ride systems; on-line access to real-time information via Internet portals