Qualcomm made several automotive announcement for automotive—- autonomous driving/safety platform, new Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chips and cloud services. The company also announced partnerships with DENSO and General Motors.
Qualcomm announced a portfolio of automotive products with the new Qualcomm® Snapdragon Ride™ Platform – one of the automotive industry’s most advanced, scalable and open autonomous driving solutions, which consists of the family of Snapdragon Ride™ Safety system-on-chips (SoCs), Snapdragon Ride™ Safety Accelerator and Snapdragon Ride™ Autonomous Stack.
The Snapdragon Ride Platform, based on the Snapdragon family of automotive SoCs and accelerator, is built on scalable and modular heterogenous high-performance multi-core CPUs, energy efficient AI and computer vision (CV) engines, industry-leading GPU. The platform with combination of SoCs and accelerator can be used as needed to address every market segment offering industry-leading thermal efficiency, from 30 Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS) for L1/L2 applications to over 700 TOPS at 130W for L4/L5 driving. This platform can therefore result in designs that can be passively or air-cooled, thereby reducing cost, and increasing reliability, avoiding the need for expensive liquid cooled systems and allowing for simpler vehicle designs, and extending the driving range for electric vehicles. The Snapdragon Ride SoCs and accelerator are designed for functional safety ASIL-D systems.
Qualcomm , also introduced a new Qualcomm® Automotive Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth® combination chip, the QCA6595AU, bringing high performance dual Medium Access Control (MAC) Wi-Fi 5 and the latest generation of Bluetooth® 5.1 to the automotive industry. Designed to reach 1 Gbps, the QCA6595AU is complementary to the Qualcomm® Automotive Wi-Fi 6 dual-MAC chip, the QCA6696, which can reach nearly 1.8 Gbps of throughput, as well as to the Wi-Fi 5 single MAC chip, the QCA6574AU, which offers up to 867 Mbps of throughput. Together with the QCA6696 and QCA6574AU, the new QCA6595AU completes Qualcomm Technologies’ portfolio of scalable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth products for virtually all vehicle classes.
Qualcomm premiered the new Qualcomm® Car-to-Cloud Service, the company’s first offering of an integrated, secure connected-car services suite for Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ Automotive Cockpit Platforms and Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ Automotive 4G and 5G Platforms. Leveraging the company’s broad set of technology assets, the Qualcomm Car-to-Cloud Service is designed to help automakers keep cockpit and telematics systems up-to-date, and future-proof vehicles by delivering the flexibility needed to activate features at any time, helping automakers to keep pace with consumer technology trends despite the traditional automotive product development cycles. The Qualcomm Car-to-Cloud Service also provides automakers the opportunity to unlock new revenue streams throughout the lifecycle of a vehicle with over-the-air (OTA) updates, on-demand unlocking of features and pay-as-you-use services, as well as gather valuable vehicle and usage analytics.
The new Qualcomm® C-V2X reference platform for vehicular and roadside units (RSUs). The Qualcomm C-V2X reference platform complements C-V2X communication solutions by offering computational power to deliver a full suite of 4G and 5G wireless, and C-V2X, solutions, including multi-frequency GNSS location services for precise positioning, V2X message security, signing and verifications and V2X Intelligent Transport System (ITS) stacks. The Qualcomm C-V2X platform is based on Qualcomm Technologies’ high performance, low power architecture, and is optimized for use with software applications to further accelerate the deployment of C-V2X vehicular systems and RSUs in the US and globally.
As a part of the long-standing relationship, GM plans to continue working with Qualcomm Technologies to power digital cockpit, telematics and advanced driver-assistance systems. The companies have also expanded their partnership into high performance compute platforms and are working together on digital cockpit solutions to design new, rich and immersive infotainment experiences.
DENSO aims to develop next-generation integrated cockpit systems harnessing Qualcomm Technologies’ information and communication technologies, including cutting-edge semiconductors and software solutions developed for smartphones and DENSO’s expertise in in-vehicle requirements, functional safety, quality, and security technologies for HMI products.
Working with Qualcomm Technologies, DENSO aims to develop an architecture*2 for systems based on DENSO’s Harmony Core™*3 integrated cockpit system that can coordinate with external cloud services and new HMI products, which enables car connectivity and advanced safety features like driver status monitoring, driver and passenger authentication, and improved display operability.