Today, December 12, the Vivante Corporation revealed that various top tier OEMs have widely adopted the company’s cores to power the next generation of computer vision applications used for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).
The real-time systems focus on safety for occupants, pedestrians and surrounding vehicles by combining all sorts of methods and tools, including cameras, sensors, GPS, and RADAR.
ADAS are used to monitor, predict and prevent accidents in most cars on the market today, including BMW and Ford, but until now Vivante has not had much of a hand in the products.
“We are proud to partner with Freescale’s automotive team to bring leading safety and computer vision features to the next generation of cars,” said Wei-Jin Dai, president and CEO of Vivante, in a statement.
Dan Loop, of Freescale’s semiconductor i.MX automotive product marketing, explained the
reasoning behind the adoption of Vivante’s graphics and computing technologies. He said, “We definitely see OpenCL gaining momentum as the industry emphasizes safety, features, and convenience. One reason for this rapid adoption of new safety features is the traction OpenCL is getting from OEMs and developers. The programmability and speed-up of some critical computer vision algorithms on the GPGPU provides significant performance gains and power savings over DSPs and CPUS.”
Dai then added, “OpenCL on the GPU has now become a fundamental part of the latest heterogeneous computer architectures. ADAS is one key area where the jump from GPU research exercise to real world implementation has been made.”
According to ABI Research from 2011, the global ADAS market value will hit $130 billion by 2016. In a separate report, ABI Research states, “Moving ADAS from niche to mass market: Europe is witnessing a surge in the availability of ADAS, reflecting the joint efforts of the automotive industry and European governments to improve safety and enhance driver comfort.”
Although this report focused on the EU, the United States is in much the same situation. With this in mind, Vivante’s new dealings with Freescale and ADAS could be greatly profitable, and beneficial to all involved—especially customers.
“Using the OpenCL solution available in the i.MX 6 platform, our customers optimize their algorithms for hybrid systems to take full advantage of the GPU as well as the CPU,” added Loop.
Edited by
Jamie Epstein