Qualcomm Technologies announced the latest addition to the company’s growing Snapdragon® Digital Chassis™ product portfolio with the introduction of the Snapdragon Ride™ Flex SoC. The 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 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.
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.
Built on the company’s continued success in developing open, scalable, high-performance, and power-efficient automotive solutions, the Flex SoC family is compatible with the broader portfolio of SoCs within the Snapdragon Digital Chassis Platform. 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 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.
The first Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC is sampling now for an expected start of production beginning in 2024. For more information on the Snapdragon Ride Flex SoCs, please read the blog post.
“We continue to remain at the forefront of automotive compute innovation, and as we enter the era of Software Defined Vehicles, the Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC family defines a new setpoint for high-performance power-optimized mixed-criticality architectures,” said Nakul Duggal, senior vice president and GM, automotive, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “We are 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 our pre-integrated suite of hardware, software, and ADAS/AD stack solutions while enabling the ecosystem to differentiate on our platforms with an accelerated time-to-market advantage.”
Qualcomm Technologies’ integrated automotive platforms – inclusive of Snapdragon® Cockpit Platforms, Snapdragon® Auto Connectivity Platforms and Snapdragon Ride Platforms – continue to drive leadership and growth with an order pipeline of more than $30 billion1. As the technology provider of choice for the global automotive industry, we are working alongside automakers utilizing a broad portfolio of automotive solutions with the Snapdragon Digital Chassis.
