NXP Semiconductors N.V. today demonstrated an autonomous vehicles platform leveraging NXP’s new BlueBox engine, and deploying NXP silicon and software solutions at each ADAS node. The system demonstration incorporates the BlueBox central computing engine, together with radar, lidar, and vision sensing, as well as an onboard secure V2X system - all of which are powered by NXP silicon currently in volume production.

In autonomous vehicles systems, multiple streams of sensor data are routed to the BlueBox engine, where they are fused to create a complete 360° world model around the vehicle. This functionality improves car safety by both managing and preventing emergency situations. BlueBox and its connected secure smart solutions also incorporate the embedded intelligence and machine learning required for complete situational assessments, supporting advanced classification tasks, object detection, localization, mapping and vehicle driving decisions.

Unlike closed systems focused only on vision or other single-sensor data streams, the NXP BlueBox engine for autonomous vehicles is an open-platform, Linux-based solution programmable in linear C language that automotive manufacturers can customize to their needs for optimal product differentiation.

The BlueBox engine incorporates NXP’s S32V automotive vision processor, as well as the company’s LS2088A embedded compute processor. The LS2088A processor integrates eight 64-bit ARM Cortex-A72 cores running at 2 GHz, along with specialized accelerators, communications interfaces, DDR4 memory controllers and more. The solution is providing BlueBox with 90,000 DMIPS (million instructions per second) of performance at under 40 Watts of power, thereby eliminating the need for fans, liquid cooling or other exotic thermal management componentry. The S32V processor includes graphics engines, dedicated image processing accelerators, as well as sensor fusion functionality, high-performance ARM cores and APEX image processing.

NXP has been shipping its BlueBox solution to select customers since September 2015.