Recently, Mr. Dan Jizhang, the founder and CEO of HiSilicon, said at the China Electric Vehicle 100-People Forum that:
“High computing power SOC chips, AI computing platforms, and excellent image processing capabilities are the basis for the evolution of autonomous driving.”
The Huashan II A1000 autonomous driving computing chip developed by HiSilicon has matured in terms of functional safety, information security, and reliability. It will be mass-produced and installed in vehicles this year to achieve L2-L3 level autonomous driving function.
With the rapid development of the intelligent new energy vehicle industry, autonomous driving function has gradually become a standard feature of new models on the market, and vehicle-grade high computing chips will become the basis for achieving autonomous driving function. It is widely believed in the industry that 2022 will be the first year of mass production of L2+ level autonomous driving vehicles in China and the first year of mass production of domestic high computing chips. After years of accumulation and rapid development, local vehicle-grade chip companies are ready to meet the challenges of mass production, and HiSilicon has taken the lead in the mass production of domestic autonomous driving chips.
The mass production of vehicle-grade chips is a very arduous process, which requires overcoming many obstacles, including building reliable chip products, developing mature software systems, and constructing a sound vehicle-grade system.
For example, the Huashan series of autonomous driving chips developed by HiSilicon has undergone more than three years of development from product design, chip design, testing, vehicle-grade certification, and algorithm toolchain development to functional safety certification, autonomous driving software package development, and perfect support for industry ecology.
HiSilicon has obtained the ASPICE CL2 vehicle-grade software certification, ISO 26262:2018 ASIL D functional safety process certification, ISO 26262 functional safety product ASIL B certification, and AEC-Q100 reliability certification. It is the first domestic autonomous driving chip company that has obtained certification from functional safety experts, functional safety process, and product certification, and has built a sound and reliable vehicle-grade certification system.
Currently, the Huashan II A1000 chip has been put into mass production and started to continuously deliver to industry customers, and will be installed in vehicles in 2022.
Since its official release in 2020, the Huashan II A1000 chip has optimized and upgraded its chip system, and has achieved stable mass production requirements in all aspects:
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Certification: The Huashan II A1000 chip has passed AEC-Q100 Grade 2 certification and ISO26262 functional safety product ASIL B certification, and can provide customers with relevant PPAP support documents at any time.
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Operating system: The Huashan series of chips have completed the porting and verification of various mainstream operating systems in the industry, including Linux, QNX, RT-Thread, and Windriver, etc.
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From the tool chain perspective, Black Sesame Intelligent’s Shānhǎi artificial intelligence development platform performs well and fully taps into the advantages of the A1000 multidimensional neural network accelerator, achieving outstanding performance of over 4,000 fps on typical industry model networks.
In terms of middleware that supports the operation of autonomous driving systems, Black Sesame Intelligent has self-developed an autonomous driving middleware oriented towards distributed computing which is compatible with multiple standard protocols such as CyberRT, DDS, and SOME/IP. It supports sensor abstraction, time synchronization, execution management, and various system services and software’s full lifecycle management. Based on Black Sesame Intelligent’s complete middleware solution, customers can quickly build upper-level applications and form a mass-produced autonomous driving system framework.
At the same time, Black Sesame Intelligent is one of the earliest domestic autonomous driving chip companies to lay out and support AUTOSAR. After nearly a year of close cooperation with ecological partners, the Huáshānèrhào A1000 series chip has been fully adapted and supports the basic software of Elektrobit and other companies. This will greatly help customers who use AUTOSAR in saving development and verification time, and shorten the production cycle.
In addition, Black Sesame Intelligent provides a large number of sample codes applicable to different autonomous driving functions and scenarios, such as GPU applications for 3D panoramic rendering, algorithm applications for forward and sideways fusion perception, H264/H265 encoding and decoding programs for driving recorders, and fisheye perception for automatic parking, etc. At the system level, diagnostic and security procedures are provided, supplemented by various production line tools, to provide maximum convenience for industry customers with different needs and enable them to carry out rapid production.
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.