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Valeo in Ireland is set to become the global centre for automotive AI as it sees a boom in orders.
The Valeo site in Tuam, outside Galway, is already a global R&D centre for vision sensors and ADAS systems, and will now take on the AI development under R&D director Derek Savage.
“The whole story around the software defined vehicle is to be a supplier of software and services. We are reorganising is around AI, and this is a move up for our R&D centre here in Tuam. We have been doing deep learning for more than ten years and developed tool chains that are mature and this is core pillar of the ADAS software stack, and we are taking a global responsibility for ADAS perception,” said Savage.
The French Tier One supplier saw turnover of €11.2bn for the first half of 2023, up by 19%. The ADAS business was up 26% and powertrain electrification more than doubled at 108%. The company has an order intake of €18.8bn, with profitability levels up on 2022. More than half of those orders are linked to innovations in driving assistance, driven by strong worldwide demand for software defined vehicles.
“We are on track to reach €27.5bn by 2025, with a plan to get to €40bn by 2040,” said Peter Reilly, general manager of the Tuam site.
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The company has 65 R&D centres and 183 production centres, with Tuam leading on ultrasonic and vision sensors.
“We have all of the different sensing technologies and the compute and the full stack with scalable architectures,” said Reilly. The wide range of customers means there are a large number of different interfaces for sensors and requirements for the AI.
“We would like there to be a standard interface but other suppliers are moving at different speeds and there are thermal issue in particular so we are SoC agnostic,” said Savage. “The design concept is to be hardware agnostic.”
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The Surround View CV Gen3 uses proprietary AI on the ECU. The CNN has a performance of 1TOPS for the segmentation of road marking and drivable area and pedestrians and combines the AI with computer vision algorithms to feed parking map and trajectory on top of that. This can provide lane sensing for L2+ autonomy at speeds of 130kph and L3 at 60kph. The company expects to launch L4 valet parking in 2026 or 27.
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