eetimes.com, Nov. 15, 2024 –
Semiconductor R&D organization imec has allied with carmakers to add chiplets to automotive silicon that will expand the adoption of AI in cars. The idea promises to put people and their autos on better speaking terms.
At an October meeting in Detroit–the U.S. auto capital–imec announced that Arm, ASE, BMW, Bosch, Cadence, Siemens, SiliconAuto, Synopsys, Tenstorrent and Valeo are the first to join its Automotive Chiplet Program, a new pre-competitive research effort. The group will evaluate chiplet architectures and packaging technologies to support carmakers' high-performance computing and strict safety requirements, while providing chiplet benefits like increased flexibility, improved performance and cost savings.
Chiplets developed by the alliance promise to double the processing power of today's cars by around 2030. For example, the P7+ electric sedan introduced by China's Xpeng in October runs two Nvidia Orin X chips to provide 508 TOPS of compute with data from eleven cameras, three millimeter-wave radars and 12 ultrasonic sensors. Imec expects autos powered by a new breed of chiplet designs to double that number to 1,000 TOPS.
"It becomes hard to build that compute as a single monolithic SoC," imec Automotive Program director Kurt Herremans told EE Times. "That's where chiplets come in."