Highly Autonomous Driving System Based on Renesas’ Automotive Dedicated ISO 26262 ASIL-B SoC and ISO 26262 ASIL-D MCU for Development of Safe ECUs

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — October 19, 2016 — Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723), a premier provider of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced a highly automated driving (HAD) solution kit that delivers high computing performance targeted at automotive functional safety to reduce development time of electronic control units (ECUs). The HAD solution kit is based on two Renesas R-Car H3 Starter Kit Premier and the automotive control RH850/P1H-C microcontroller (MCU), and therefore is compliant with both ISO 26262 ASIL-B functionality safety standard and ISO 26262 ASIL-D standard (Note 1). The new solution kit enables system developers to immediately evaluate functions and software in an environment that is similar to the actual development of ECUs, thereby reduces developers’ time and efforts when porting software to the actual ECUs.

The automotive market is moving rapidly to make highly autonomous driving a reality for consumers by 2020. However, this is a challenging path as autonomous driving level 3 and beyond (Note 2) requires high computing power while maintaining safety and ensuring quality. During the initial development of autonomous driving systems, OEM and Tier-1 system developers first create prototype systems and test them using PCs. To adapt a prototype system to fit the actual vehicle, features such as low power consumption and high performance, operation under high temperature, and compliance with specific standards such as functional safety and system specifications must all be aligned. Therefore, the step to adapt a newly developed system into the actual vehicle is known to be challenging.

The Renesas HAD solution kit supports software development and software verification that Tier-1s and OEMs are using for automotive ECUs. This is being integrated in a robust housing with multiple interfaces that provides rich connectivity close to actual automotive ECUs.

Key features of the new HAD solution kit:

The solution kit simultaneously provides the high computing power required for autonomous driving, maintains a high level of safety, and ensures quality as it connects two Renesas’ market-proven R-Car H3 system-on-chip (SoC)-based starter kits and one RH850 P1H-C MCU through on-board high-speed interfaces and provides connection to peripherals using multiple external interfaces, such as CAN-FD, FlexRay and Ethernet.

The solution kit simplifies software development for mass production ECUs by allowing evaluation of the development using the HAD solution kit in the vehicle. The robust and compact design of the housing allows testing in the lab as well as in test drives that meet automotive requirements, which are known to be demanding in relation to operating temperature, low power consumption and small implementation size.

The implemented R-Car H3 Starter Kit Premier is based on the R-Car H3: a high-end, high-performance SoC designed for automotive applications. The SoC based on ARM^® Cortex^®-A57/A53 cores can be used as an automotive computing platform solution for driving safety support systems and in-vehicle infotainment systems, and achieves processing performance of over 40,000 DMIPS (Dhrystone million instructions per second (Note 3)) for enhanced processing power. The R-Car H3 is also ISO 26262 ASIL-B compliant.

In addition, the R-Car H3 features powerful graphics processing units (GP-GPU) core by Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR^® GX6650 and Renesas’ IMP-X5 parallel programming core with optimal structure for processing of computer vision and deep learning, to enable the advanced calculation processing required for autonomous driving.