Denso seals Quadric deal for RISC-V AI core
Leading Japanese automotive supplier Denso is expanding its semiconductor business through a development license agreement for a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) AI core from Quadric in the US, adding its own RISC-V IP.
Denso will acquire the IP core license for Quadric’s Chimera general purpose NPU, and the two companies will co-develop NPU IP for an automotive chip using the RISC-V instruction set architecture. Denso’s chip design subsidiary Nsitexe has been working with Quadrics since 2021 on the silicon.
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Automated driving and connected technologies are driving the need for vehicles to process vast amounts of data from on-board sensors, as well as inter-vehicle and cloud communications. This requires higher performance automotive controllers such as the Chimera core developed by Quadric. This can handle matrix and vector operations alongside scalar control code in one execution pipeline. This flexibility in handling diverse computational tasks makes it applicable to various AI functions. In addition, by using Chimera GPNPU, automotive system developers can add proprietary AI features to their products throughout the future. The company moved to an IP model in 2022 and signed up to the Silicon Catalyst accelerator programme last year.
Denso ‘s RISC-V-based processor IP is compliant with the highest level ISO26262 ASIL D certification for automotive applications where safety is critical. The resulting NPU design will be used for in-vehicle system on chip (SoC) devices that can flexibly respond to changes in AI trends over a long period of time, from product development to in the field with over the air (OTA) updates after the release of a vehicle.
“One of the businesses we are strengthening is semiconductors, which is the foundation of the computing infrastructure for the advancement of vehicle intelligence. We have high expectations for the development of in-vehicle semiconductor IP that can flexibly respond to the AI trend with low power by utilizing quadric Chimera GPNPU,” said Hiroshi Kondo, Head of Mobility Electronics Business Group at Denso.
“As a marquee Tier 1 automotive supplier throughout the world, Denso subjected our technology to a comprehensive and intense benchmarking exercise [since 2019]. Being selected by Denso as their ADAS/AD processor IP partner is a great validation of the growing maturity and breadth of Quadric’s GPNPU processors,” said Veerbhan Kheterpal, CEO of Quadric.