Chip designer ARM
launches processor fit for driverless cars
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[September 20, 2016]
By Kate Holton
LONDON (Reuters) - ARM, the British
chip designer powering the global mobile phone industry, launched a
new processor on Tuesday for driverless cars, seeking to secure its
place at the heart of the burgeoning industry.
Bought by Japan's SoftBank for $32 billion this month, ARM said the
processor was designed to increase safety in increasingly complex
systems and could work across a range of industries from autonomous
vehicles to industrial and medical robotics.
The Cortex-R52 processor, which has been under construction for
between 3 and 5 years, has been licensed to Franco-Italian chipmaker
and partner STMicroelectronics in its first deal.
ARM said the processor was designed to keep the most critical
software code separate, in order to protect the running of the
platform. That would enable it to improve safety when a car wants to
overtake, accelerate or break suddenly, for example.
"If you have a piece of safety critical code, you want to be sure
that nothing can interfere with that," John Ronco, VP Product
Marketing, told Reuters.
The 26-year-old ARM, based in Cambridge, eastern England, provides
the technology in nearly all smartphones including Apple's iPhone
and Samsung's Galaxy.
It is also poised to play a central role in the tech industry shift
to the 'internet of things' - a network of devices, vehicles and
building sensors that collect and exchange data.
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"What we see is that all of these systems have a similar technology platform, a
similar framework in terms of what they're doing, and they have the same
requirements in terms of having processors that can safely make decisions about
what the system should do," Ronco said.
Autonomous or driverless cars are seen as the next big thing for the tech
industry, with the British government putting the market value at 900 billion
pounds ($1.17 trillion) worldwide.
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Traditional automakers face competition from rivals such as Tesla and technology
firms such as Alphabet Inc's unit Google, which wants eventually to be able to
deploy fully autonomous vehicles without human controls.
($1 = 0.7718 pounds)
(Reporting by Kate Holton; Editing by Tom Heneghan)
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