
Dream Chip shows ADAS processor on FDSOI
The chip is an Advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) computer vision SoC developed under the auspices of the European Things2Do project in cooperation with ARM, Arteris, Cadence, Globalfoundries and Invecas. The chip was manufactured at Fab 1, Dresden Germany where Globalfoundries hosts its FDSOI manufacturing.
Dream Chip is a design service company specialized in the development of ASICs, FPGAs, embedded software and systems with a strong application focus on automotive vision systems. The company is the result of more than 20 years of endeavour having been founded as Sican by the government of lower Saxony in 1990. In 2000 it was acquired by Infineon Technologies and operated as Sci-worx. It was then bought by Silicon Image before a management buy-out in 2010 and a name change to Dream Chip Technologies.
The chip the team has developed is intended for high performance image acquisition and supports convolutional neural network (CNN) vision workloads for object detection and identification. It supports road-sign detection, lane departure warning, driver distraction warning, blind spot detection, surround vision, park assist, pedestrian detection, cruise control and emergency braking.
The selection of the 22nm FDSOI process is intended to allow all this at low power.
The chip includes a proprietary image signal processing pipeline – DSP for image processing was one of the strengths of Sican – as well as multiple licensed-in cores. These include quad Cortex-A53 cores, Tensilica Vision P6 DSPs and dual Cortex-R5 to provide functional safety compliant to ISO26262. The cores are interconnected using a FlexNoC network-on-chip licensed from Arteris. Invecas has supplied foundation IP such as LPDDR4 interface, PLL, thermal sensor and process monitor.
“The project not only shows the strength of the European semiconductor industry, but also an ability to collaborate efficiently to provide technology needed urgently by the industry to power advanced automated driving solutions,” said Jens Benndorf, managing director and co-founder of DCT, in a statement.
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