Ambarella Unveils World’s First Centrally Processed 4D Imaging Radar Architecture for Autonomous Mobility Systems - Seite 2

To create this unique, cost-effective new architecture, Ambarella optimized the Oculii algorithms for its CV3 AI domain controller SoC family and added specific radar signal processing acceleration. The CV3’s industry-leading AI performance per watt offers the high compute and memory capacity needed to achieve high radar density, range and sensitivity. Additionally, a single CV3 can efficiently provide high-performance, real-time processing for perception, low-level sensor fusion and path planning, centrally and simultaneously, within autonomous vehicles and robots.

“No other semiconductor and software company has advanced in-house capabilities for both radar and camera technologies, as well as AI processing,” said Fermi Wang, President and CEO of Ambarella. “This expertise allowed us to create an unprecedented centralized architecture that combines our unique Oculii radar algorithms with the CV3’s industry-leading domain control performance per watt to efficiently enable new levels of AI perception, sensor fusion and path planning that will help realize the full potential of ADAS, autonomous driving and robotics.”

The data sets of competing 4D imaging radar technologies are too large to transport and process centrally. They generate multiple terabits per second of data per module, while consuming more than 20 watts of power per radar module, due to thousands of MIMO antennas used by each module to provide the high angular resolution required for 4D imaging radar. That is multiplied across the six or more radar modules required to cover a vehicle, making central processing impractical for other radar technologies, which must process radar data across thousands of antennas.

By applying AI software to dynamically adapt the radar waveforms generated with existing monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) devices, and using AI sparsification to create virtual antennas, Oculii technology reduces the antenna array for each processor-less MMIC radar head in this new architecture to 6 transmit x 8 receive. Overall, the number of MMICs is drastically reduced, while achieving an extremely high 0.5 degrees of joint azimuth and elevation angular resolution. Additionally, Ambarella’s centralized architecture consumes significantly less power, at the maximum duty cycle, and reduces the bandwidth for data transport by 6x, while eliminating the need for pre-filtered, edge processing and its resulting loss in sensor information.