ARM HOLDINGS PLC in Automotive Artificial Intelligence

Arm Holdings majorly offers processors and sensors to the automotive industry. The company has designed these sensors according to the different stages of their applications. Sense - This stage involves gathering information about the environment through a range of sensors. Depending on the type of sensor, the data collection systems within the vehicle can be powered by Cortex-A, Cortex-R or Cortex-M processors. For example, in a forward facing vision system, the sense part is likely to use an ISP (Image Signal Processor) and a Computer Vision accelerator combined with a Cortex-A processor, and possibly a Cortex-R or Cortex-M Perceive - In the perceive stage, the system is filtering and interpreting the data, understanding what can be learned about the environment from the sensor data. The types of workloads seen in this stage are throughput sensitive which is why the Cortex-A processors play a predominant role here. A lot of data in ADAS and Autonomous systems is parallelizable, that is, it can be processed at the same time. For this reason, Cortex-A processors are usually closely coupled with GPUs and ML processors, thus enabling a large amount of computation of the sensor data Decide - During the decide stage, the system safely chooses the correct action for the vehicle to take. There are increased levels of performance, latency sensitivity and safety required. Cortex-A, in particular the new SplitLock enabled Cortex-A76AE, plays a critical role as a high-performance decision and planning engine. Its superior ability in cognitive processing through Arm DynamIQ technology makes it a perfect fit for autonomous vehicles, where more powerful machines are needed. Cortex-R also comes into play here, particularly from a functional safety perspective. It can act as a sense check on the decision made by higher level processing power before reaching the actuation stage.The Cortex-R52 is a good example of this due to its focus on redundancy and determinism Actuate - The actuate stage is where the vehicles dynamic behaviour is modified by the decision reached in the earlier processing stages. At this point, messages are distributed across the vehicle that require deterministic behaviour and real-time responsiveness. Cortex-R is a natural fit for this step in the processing pipeline particularly where there is demand for highly intelligent control and communication. Depending on the complexity of the control tasks and the actuation demands, Cortex-M processors can also handle some specific and simple actuate tasks