ARM launched the ARM Cortex-R52 processor on Tuesday for driverless cars, seeking to secure its place at the heart of the burgeoning industry. The new real-time processor is armed with safety features for autonomous vehicles and medical and industrial robots. It was designed to address functional safety in systems that must comply with ISO 26262 ASIL D and IEC 61508 SIL 3, the most stringent safety standards in the automotive and industrial markets.

STMicroelectronics has licensed the processor to enable it to create highly integrated SoCs for the automotive market.

The Cortex-R52 offers hardware-enforced separation of software tasks to ensure safety-critical code is fully isolated. This allows the hardware to be managed by a software hypervisor policing the execution and resourcing of tasks. By enabling the separation of software, the Cortex-R52 decreases the amount of code that must be safety-certified, so speeding up development as software integration, maintenance and validation is easier. The processor also deals with increased software complexity while delivering the determinism and fast context switching that real-time systems demand.

The availability of ARM Fast Models and Cycle Models enables ARM's software partners to develop solutions for the processor. They further speed the path to market as software developers will get access to the Cortex-R52 early in the design process. The Cortex-R52 offers a thirty five percent performance uplift compared to the Cortex-R5, which is already deployed in a range of safety applications. It has achieved a score of 1.36 Automark/MHz on the EEMBC AutoBench, the highest in its class, using the Green Hills Compiler 2017.