Continental Integrates Ambarella’s Scalable System-on-Chip Family in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

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In the future, Continental will offer Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) solutions based on the “CV3” artificial intelligence (AI) system-on-chip (SoC) family from semiconductor company Ambarella. The high-performance, power-efficient and scalable SoC portfolio, which is built for ADAS applications, complements Continental’s solutions for assisted driving and further advances vehicle automation. The more sensors that are installed in a vehicle, the greater the amount of data collected to detect the environment. The joint solution with centralized single-chip processing based on 5-nanometer technology enables the next generation of vehicles to process the environmental perception of multiple sensors even faster, thanks to the increased performance level. Sensor solutions include high-resolution cameras, radars, lidars as well as ultrasonic sensors. The integrated SoC enables early data fusion, in which the information from different sensors is processed simultaneously for various applications such as emergency brake assist, parking or cruising.

“After exchanges on different use cases with Ambarella for two years, Continental is now integrating its high-performance, low latency, and low-power processing chipset into our assisted driving solutions. This brings our ADAS systems to the next level and helps to serve the growing amount of sensor data in the vehicle. With this, we achieve a more comprehensive and accurate environmental perception,” said Frank Petznick, Head of the Autonomous Mobility Business Area at Continental. “We have now combined our expertise in this field to offer an enhanced level of systems performance as well as the scalable solutions required by the market.”

Significant impact for industry and degree of vehicle automation

Continental's driver assistance systems enhanced with Ambarella's SoCs can process more collected data faster. In this way, they increase precision and enable a larger range of functions. The high scalability of the system-on-chip family allows vehicle manufacturers to choose the necessary performance level for their system requirements using the same vehicle architecture.

Despite the higher performance and accuracy, the solution consumes less power. This also leads to fewer cooling efforts, making sustainable energy savings possible, while also reducing system costs. As an added value to vehicle manufacturers, they can reduce their engineering investments across all vehicle types.

Unique system-on-chip performance with low power consumption

Ambarella’s fully scalable, power-efficient family of system-on-chips provides significant AI performance per watt for neural network computation, with a performance increase of over 40 times compared to its former semiconductor chip family. Additionally, Ambarella integrates its image signal processor technology into all SoCs. This results in robust ADAS systems with higher levels of environmental perception in challenging lighting, weather and driving conditions for both machine and human vision. Humans see through the sensors of the assistance system.

Continental’s ADAS systems with the integrated system-on-chip will be showcased for the first time at CES 2023 in Las Vegas.