Gasgoo Awards 2023 applicant: Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC from Qualcomm

Product: Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC 

Description

Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC in January 2023. The Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC is engineered to support mixed-criticality workloads across heterogenous compute resources, allowing for the digital cockpit, ADAS and AD functions to co-exist on a single SoC. Designed to meet the highest level of automotive safety, the Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC enables a hardware architecture to support isolation, freedom from interference, and quality-of-service (QoS) for specific ADAS functions and comes equipped with a dedicated Automotive Safety Integrity Level D (ASIL-D) safety island. Furthermore, the Flex SoC pre-integrates a software platform that supports multi-operating system operating concurrently, hypervisor enablement with isolated virtual machines, and real-time operating system (OS) with an Automotive Open System Architecture (AUTOSAR) to meet the mixed criticality workload requirements for driver assistance safety systems, digital reconfigurable clusters, infotainment systems, driver monitoring systems (DMS), and park-assist systems.

Unique advantages

Built on the company’s continued success in developing open, scalable, high-performance, and power-efficient automotive solutions, the Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC family is compatible with the broader portfolio of SoCs within the Snapdragon Digital Chassis Platform. The Flex SoC is also designed to be an ideal in-vehicle central-compute platform to power the next-generation Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) solutions by providing best-in-class high performance, heterogenous safe compute with the ability to execute flexible mixed critical cloud-native workloads. The in-vehicle compute is complemented by a rich offering of platform software capable of being deployed on a containerized infrastructure. The Flex SoC is supported by a cloud-native automotive software development workflow which includes support for virtual platform simulation that can be integrated as part of in-cloud development operations (DevOps) and machine learning operations (MLOps) infrastructure. Base on the following advantages, the Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC is designed to be the ideal in-vehicle central-compute solution that supports the next-generation SDV solutions: In-Car infrastructure  Mixed Critical Heterogenous Centralized Compute Platform: Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC provides an ideal mix of compute and heterogenous accelerator engines required to meet the needs of next-generation SDV workloads. It provides flexibility to host multiple mixed critical workloads on the same platform, enabling the ability to consolidate various domain controllers performing IVI, ADAS/AD compute onto a single platform. In addition to the typical compute features, there are specific hardware features that Flex SoC facilitates to support spatial and temporal isolation that are crucial for supporting a functionally safe system.  Base Platform Software Supporting Mixed Criticality: To complement the powerful hardware features, Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC supports a rich base platform stack. On the application processor, the Flex SoC supports safe hypervisor which provides spatial isolation between multiple mixed critical domains with support for rich base operating systems like Linux, Android and QNX. Additionally, Qualcomm is working on providing the support for specific hardware features that may support mixed criticality across the base platform software stack facilitating necessary QoS control interfaces for higher level middleware and cloud-native infrastructure to leverage.   Automotive Cloud-Native Container Infrastructure: On top of the base platform software that enables a cloud-native workflow, Qualcomm plans to support in-vehicle mixed critical cloud-native containers and orchestrator infrastructure working closely with the ecosystem. This capability will extend the flexibility of Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC to execute concurrent mixed critical workload to the cloud-native design paradigm and one of the cornerstones to incrementally bring the SDV vision to reality.   Service Oriented Communications Middleware: With the base platform software and automotive cloud-native container infrastructure in place, the other most important software component is a service-oriented communication middleware to enable a standard-based high performance low latency inter-process and inter-node communication between containers running in a single or multiple compute node. Flex SoC platform supports SOME/IP and DDS as the two most used communication middleware in automotive with extension to leverage mixed critical features in Flex SoC.   Heterogenous Compute/AI Libraries: To complement the solid platform software and hardware infrastructure — to allow the automotive software developers to write software making the best use of Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC capabilities — Qualcomm provides multiple safety certifiable libraries like AI SDK, that can be used to write application on bare metal or in containerized environments.  In-Cloud infrastructure  Virtual Platforms: As part of the Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC offering, Qualcomm is supporting virtual platforms with different levels that are getting integrated as part of the cloud-native DevOps and MLOps infrastructure of some of the leading OEMs. As part of its expanding automotive virtual platform portfolio, Qualcomm is also working on adding advanced capabilities, allowing automotive developers to quicky verify the KPIs of their AI models developed for Flex SoC when new in-car or synthetic sensor data becomes available, thus contributing to increasing the developer efficiency multi-folds.  DevOps/MLOps: Qualcomm is working with multiple OEMs to support Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC-based development infrastructure as part of their DevOps/MLOps flow with intercepts into the Snapdragon virtual platforms. One of the key objectives is to promote the Flex SoC and Snapdragon Digital Chassis as a complete SDV product portfolio to provide the optimal in-cloud infrastructure to provide best-in-class developer effectiveness.

Application

The Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC is engineered to support mixed-criticality workloads across heterogenous compute resources, allowing for the digital cockpit, ADAS and AD functions to co-exist on a single SoC. The Flex SoC is optimized for performance scalability, ranging from entry-level to premium, high-end central-compute systems, providing the flexibility to automakers to choose the appropriate performance point for their vehicle tiers. With this capability, automakers are able to realize complex cockpit use-cases, such as integrated instrument clusters with immersive high-end graphics, infotainment and gaming displays, and rear seat entertainment screens, concurrently with latency-critical premium audio experience and the pre-integrated Snapdragon Ride Vision stack. These performance requirements can be realized by utilizing hardware and software co-design. The Flex SoC is pre-integrated with the industry-proven Snapdragon Ride Vision stack, which enables highly scalable and safe driver assistance and automated driving experiences using a front camera to meet regulatory requirements, and multi-modal sensors (multiple cameras, radars, lidars and maps) for enhanced perception that creates an environmental model around the vehicle feeding into vehicle control algorithms.  The Snapdragon Ride Vision stack meets the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) requirements and Europe’s General Safety Regulations (GSR) while scaling up to higher levels of autonomy.

Prospect

With the rise of electric vehicles, change in electrical/electronic (E/E) architecture and explosive growth in software, the automotive industry is experiencing a disruptive transformation and the concept of Software-Defined-Vehicle (SDV) has also come into being. The Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC is an ideal central-compute solution that supports the next-generation SDV solutions for OEMs and across the SDV ecosystem. Qualcomm continues to remain at the forefront of automotive compute innovation, and as the industry enters the era of Software Defined Vehicles, the Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC family defines a new setpoint for high-performance power-optimized mixed-criticality architectures. The Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC-enabled SDV development and deployment infrastructure supports shift-left automotive system development while providing infrastructure to develop and deploy new features across the lifetime of the vehicle. Qualcomm is making it easier and more cost effective for automakers and Tier-1s to embrace the transition to an integrated, open, and scalable architecture across all vehicle tiers with its pre-integrated suite of hardware, software, and ADAS/AD stack solutions while enabling the ecosystem to differentiate on Qualcomm’s platforms with an accelerated time-to-market advantage. Besides, this allows OEMs to create new post-sale service-based business models while providing end customers with enhanced user experiences. The first Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC is sampling now for an expected start of production beginning in 2024.