Gasgoo Awards 2022 applicant: two automotive chip products from Qualcomm

For the Gasgoo Awards 2022, two of Qualcomm's automotive chip products have applied for the Top 100 Players of China's New Automotive Supply Chain.

Photo credit: Qualcomm

1) Product: Snapdragon Ride Platform

Description

The Snapdragon Ride Platform is 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.

Photo credit: Qualcomm

Snapdragon Ride aims to address the complexity of autonomous driving and ADAS by leveraging its high-performance, power-efficient hardware, industry-leading artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, and pioneering autonomous driving stack to deliver a comprehensive, cost and energy-efficient systems solution. 

In January 2021, Qualcomm announced the expansion of its Snapdragon Ride Platform portfolio with new safety-grade SoCs for NCAP Level 1 ADAS Windshield-Mount to Level 4 Automation Levels. In January 2022, Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon Ride Vision System – a new open, scalable, and modular computer vision software stack, designed for an optimized implementation of front and surround cameras for ADAS and automated driving AD.

Unique advantages

The Snapdragon Ride platform portfolio is comprised of one of the automotive industry’s most advanced, scalable, and highly customizable automated driving SoC platforms, engineered to not only support automakers and Tier-1s to produce more power-efficient and thermal designs but to also provide alternatives for customization opportunities, while also charting a course for next-generation automotive architecture evolution. 

Snapdragon Ride now scales from 10 Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS) for windshield-mount ADAS cameras in a sub-5W power budget to over 700 TOPS for fully automated driving solutions. Snapdragon Ride offers an open programmable framework that allows automakers and Tier-1 suppliers to customize the platform for their unique requirements for camera perception, sensor fusion, drive policy, automated parking, driver monitoring, and more. To accelerate the deployment of cutting-edge ADAS/AD solutions, Snapdragon Ride continues to expand its software ecosystem with various industry-proven and leading stacks for visual perception, parking, and driver monitoring. These SoCs are expected to provide global automakers and Tier-1 suppliers with an opportunity to select one or a combination of these various stacks based on Snapdragon Ride.

The latest addition to the Snapdragon Ride Platform portfolio – the Snapdragon Ride Vision System combines the purpose-built, high-performance Snapdragon Ride SoCs with the next generation vision perception software stack from Arriver, and supports flexible deployment options with its ability to scale from entry-tier New Car NCAP front camera applications to higher levels of automation that require comprehensive front and surround-view camera applications, allowing for a common implementation of features and requirements, with functional safety/SOTIF support, across virtually all vehicle tiers and types. 

The Snapdragon Ride Vision System offers a uniquely designed modular architecture to extend the flexibility for automakers to integrate map crowdsourcing, driver monitoring system (DMS), parking systems, and cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) technologies and localization modules to support better customization and up-integration.

Application

The unique combination of Snapdragon Ride SoCs, accelerator, and autonomous stack offers automakers a scalable solution designed to support three industry segments of autonomous systems：

● L1/L2 Active Safety ADAS for vehicles that include automatic emergency braking, traffic sign recognition, and lane-keeping assist functions;

● L2+ Convenience ADAS for vehicles featuring Automated Highway Driving, Self-Parking and Urban Driving in Stop-and-Go traffic;

● L4/L5 Fully Autonomous Driving for autonomous urban driving, robo-taxis and robo-logistics.

Prospect

Since its introduction in 2020, Snapdragon Ride has gained momentum with global automakers and Tier-1 suppliers who are currently developing their next-generation fleets with Snapdragon Ride. Along with the SoC family, Snapdragon Ride brings an industry-proven vision stack for the front, and surround camera systems and a driving stack that is seamlessly integrated with an SDK and cloud-enabled toolchain, comprised of multi-sensor fusion, map-based localization, planning, and prediction systems to support NCAP to L3 driving systems.

Snapdragon Ride-based SoC and Accelerator L2+ to L4 platforms are expected to be available in production vehicles beginning in 2022. Snapdragon Ride SoCs for NCAP to L2+, with integrated stacks, are planned for 2024 production programs.

2) Product: 3rd Generation Snapdragon Cockpit Platform

Description

As Qualcomm’s first-announced scalable artificial intelligence (AI)-based platforms, the 3rd Generation Snapdragon Cockpit Platforms are designed to transform in-vehicle experiences, supporting higher levels of computing and intelligence needed for advanced capabilities featured in next-generation vehicles, including highly intuitive AI experiences for in-car virtual assistance, natural interactions between the vehicle and driver, and contextual safety use cases. 

Photo credit: Qualcomm

Utilizing precise positioning for enhanced navigation solutions, and cutting-edge technologies for immersive audio and rich visual experiences, the 3rd Generation Snapdragon Cockpit Platform is designed to unleash transformative experiences for the driver and passengers.

The 3rd Generation Snapdragon Cockpit Platforms has a new tiering system comprised of Performance, Premiere, and Paramount classes for the entry-level, mid-tier, and supercomputing platforms, respectively.

Currently, the models annoucned to equip with the 3rd Generation Snapdragon Cockpit Platform include Great Wall Motor's third-generation Haval H6, WEY Mocha, WEY Latte, WEY Macchiato, Geely Xingyue L, BYD D1, Chery Jetour X70 PLUS, LEAPMOTOR C11, NIO ET7, IM L7, WM Motor W6, XPeng P5, XPeng G9, HiPhi X, HiPhi Z, Li Auto L9, and Rising Auto R7, etc.

Unique advantages

Qualcomm's first-announced AI-powered automotive-grade scalable cockpit platforms, powered by Qualcomm's most advanced heterogeneous compute platform for the automotive sector

Building on the technology introduced with multi-generation Snapdragon Cockpit Platforms, the 3rd Generation Snapdragon Cockpit Platforms are engineered with immersive graphics, multimedia, computer vision, and artificial intelligence capabilities. The new platforms feature integrated heterogeneous computing capabilities, leveraging the multi-core Qualcomm AI Engine, Qualcomm Spectra Image Signal Processor (ISP), fourth-generation Qualcomm Kryo Central Processing Unit (CPU), Qualcomm Hexagon Processor, and sixth-generation Qualcomm Adreno Visual Subsystem. The Qualcomm AI Engine optimizes the AI capabilities of all primary Snapdragon cores including CPU, GPU, and the Hexagon Processor. The all-new Hexagon Processor includes Hexagon Vector eXtensions (HVX) and a dedicated Hexagon Tensor Accelerator (HTA) to provide exceptional AI acceleration for a more power-efficient implementation of edge-based machine learning use-cases such as Natural Language Processing and Object classification. 

The 3rd Generation Snapdragon Cockpit Platforms also feature the Qualcomm Secure Processing Unit (SPU), engineered to help protect personal and vehicle data, and Qualcomm Vision Enhanced Precise Positioning based camera sensors and computer vision capabilities to support differentiated use-cases on lane-level crowdsourcing of drive data for building map layers.

Unified software framework, highly flexible and scalable

The 3rd Generation Snapdragon Cockpit Platforms include virtualization support compatibility with leading hypervisor solutions to address the domain convergence of infotainment and instrumentation systems, helping automakers meet the increasing complexity demanded by the consolidation of the digital cluster and infotainment domains.  These new platforms also leverage the same software architecture and framework across all tiers allowing automakers to offer a harmonized user experience independent of the vehicle tier while leveraging the same software framework.  The new platforms also offer comprehensive software support for Android, LINUX high-level, and other real-time operating systems, providing flexible and scalable software solutions to support mixed-criticality solutions, multiple engine control unit (ECU) consolidations, one-to-many high-resolution and refresh rate displays, basic audio to multi-zone, luxury Hi-Fi with multi-mic echo cancellation and noise reduction for voice calls and user interface interaction, and state-of-the-art 2D and 3D graphic visualization for vehicle occupants to utilize connected services information and enjoy protected movie and entertainment content.

Comprehensive wireless technologies support

The 3rd Generation Snapdragon Cockpit Platforms feature an advanced suite of wireless technologies to support multi-mode cellular connectivity, Wi-Fi 6, as well as enhanced Bluetooth technologies.

Application

The 3rd Generation Snapdragon Cockpit Platforms transform in-vehicle experiences featuring high-performance computing, immersive graphics, and enhanced multimedia for all vehicle tiers， supporting automakers to rapidly develop high-performance, energy-efficient automotive digital cockpit platforms and accelerating innovation in the automotive industry.

Comprehensive technology capabilities to support automakers in bringing high-quality immersive driving experience to users

● Highly Intuitive AI Experiences: Qualcomm AI Engine for driver and passenger personalization, in-car virtual assistance, natural voice control, language understanding, and adaptive human-machine interfaces.

● Contextual Safety for intelligent driving assistance systems, including in-cabin monitoring and ultra-HD surround view monitoring.

● Smarter Navigation: lane-level navigation with visual aid positioning and multi-frequency global navigation satellite system (GNSS) to support augmented reality-based navigation systems.

● Rich Visual Experiences: support for multiple displays throughout the vehicle, including ultra-wide panoramic displays, reconfigurable 3-D digital instrument clusters, augmented reality heads-up display (HUD), and ultra-HD media streaming.

● Immersive Audio: provides premium audio experiences, including personalized multi-audio zones customized for each user, crystal clear in-car communication, and active noise and echo cancellation with engine noise suppression capabilities.

Highly integrated development kits that provide a complete hardware and software environment for rapid product development, accelerating innovation in the automotive industry

● The automotive ecosystem can evaluate, demonstrate and develop third-generation automotive solutions leveraging the Qualcomm Snapdragon Automotive Development Platform (ADP). Based on the 3rd Generation Snapdragon Cockpit Platforms, the highly integrated Snapdragon ADP is designed to provide a comprehensive hardware and software environment for the rapid development of high-performing and power-efficient automotive cockpit platforms. 

● The ADP is designed in a single DIN form-factor and mechanical housing for easy prototyping in cars and features support for Android and LINUX high-level and real-time operating systems and hypervisor virtualization support, as well as support for multiple high-resolution displays and cameras, including driver monitoring and surround-view cameras.

Prospect

In response to the "Electrified, Autonomous, Connected and Shared" transformation in the auto industry, leading automakers are redefining cars and promoting business model innovation through cutting-edge technologies and innovative electrical and electronic architecture design to meet consumers' new expectations for the future automotive, creating a diverse digital experience and safe, efficient and intelligent travel experience. Qualcomm's multi-generation solutions bring powerful compute capabilities for multiple 4K displays, top-notch audio and video, streaming entertainment, and contextual safety in the car, continuously promoting the driving experience upgrade and gaining wide recognition from the automotive industry.

Qualcomm is currently ranked number one in telematics, automotive connectivity, and next-generation premium infotainment systems. All major global automakers have selected the Snapdragon Cockpit Platforms. Many domestic and international automakers, including Audi, Jaguar, Land Rover, Volvo, Honda, General Motors, Renault, Li Auto, Lynk&Co, XPeng, GAC, Haval, BYD, Chery Jetour, LEAPMOTOR, NIO, WEY, HiPhi, Evergrande Auto, IM Motors, ZEEKR, SAIC MG, Geely, WM Motor, and JiDU, have launched or announced vehicles powered by the Snapdragon Cockpit Platforms.