Samsung Electronics’ foundry service will use its 5 nm process technology to build Ambarella’s automotive artificial intelligence (AI) central domain controller.
The AI semiconductor will be used for autonomous driving and vehicle safety systems as the chip is used for AI processing performance, power and reliability.
Called CV3-AD685, the semiconductor is the first production version of Ambarella’s automotive AI central domain controllers. The companies announced that Tier-1 automotive suppliers have already signed on to offer vehicles using the CV3-AD685 system-on-chip.
According to Samsung, its 5 nm process technology is optimized for automotive-grade semiconductors with advanced IP for reliability and traceability.
“Samsung brings 5 nm EUV FinFET technology to automotive applications for unprecedented ADAS and vision processor performance,” said Sang-Pil Sim, executive VP and head of foundry services at Samsung Electronics. “With Tier-1 automotive suppliers already adopting the technology, we believe other automotive companies will also consider using the Ambarella CV3-AD SoC product family manufactured in Samsung’s 5 nm process.”
The AI chip
The CV3-AD685 AI chip ingrates Ambarella’s CVflow AI engine allowing for neural network processing that is 20 times faster than its previous chips. The technology also provides general-vector and neural-vector processing capabilities to improve performance for full autonomous driving stack processing such as computer vision, 4G imaging radar, deep sensor fusion and path planning.
This will be the first CV3-AD semiconductor to use Samsung’s 5 nm process and will integrate:
- Advanced image processing
- Dense stereo and optical flow engine
- Arm Cortex A78AR and R52 CPUs
- Automotive GPU for visualizations
- Hardware security module (HSM)
- Support for autonomous driving software stack
Additionally, the AI semiconductor is built specifically for ADAS and a wide range of assisted driving features. The SoC enables information for various sensors to be fused for robust L2+ and L4 autonomous driving.
