Nvidia certifies Drive OS to ASIL-D, but on Orin
Nvidia has certified its Drive OS operating system with TÜV SÜD and TÜV Rheinland in Germany to provide the first ASIL-D operating system.
The Drive AGX Hyperion platform, with the OS, sensor suite and level 2+ software stack was certified on the current AGX Orin production silicon, says Ali Kani, vice president of automotive at Nvidia. Orin is being used by Volvo, Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar Landrover and now Toyota, the world’s largest car maker.
The company is also opening an AI systems inspection lab to help build software for autonomous driving on its chips.
“This is something that was missing from the industry, there is no ASIL-D OS running on a single SoC,” said Kani. “Drive OS is an OS for an advanced SOC and we have hardened CUDA and tensor RT for safety and we have a hardware hypervisor to run efficiently, rather than QNX with a software hypervisor.”
The latest iteration of Hyperion is designed for both passenger and commercial vehicles using the Drive AGX Thor single chip built on the Blackwell architecture and is planned for the first half of this year.
However the software, which has 7m lines of code, will need certification on the Thor system-on-chip silicon, which has yet to be announced. This is despite Nvidia’s position that the architecture compatibility and scalability means developers can use existing software from earlier Drive product generations, as well as integrate future updates. Unlike Orin, the Blackwell architecture in Thor is optimised for generative AI, vision language models and large language models with a simplified architecture.
TÜV SÜD granted the ISO 21434 Cybersecurity Process certification for the automotive SoC, platform and software engineering processes and that DriveOS 6.0 conforms to ISO 26262 Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) D standards, pending certification release.
TÜV Rheinland, which performed an independent United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) safety assessment of NVIDIA DRIVE AV related to safety requirements for complex electronic systems.
“A billion vehicles driving trillions of miles each year move the world. With autonomous vehicles — one of the largest robotics markets — now here, the Nvidia Blackwell-powered platform will shift this revolution into high gear,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO. “The next wave of autonomous machines will rely on physical AI world foundation models to understand and interact with the real world, and Drive is purpose-built for this new era, delivering unmatched functional safety and AI.”
Nvidia is also now accredited by the ANSI National Accreditation Board (ANAB) to provide safety and cybersecurity inspections for its automotive partners. The Drive AI Systems Inspection Lab will help developers build autonomous driving software that meets the industry’s evolving safety and AI standards.
In addition to the $1bn Drive AGX in-vehicle computer business, two other Nvidia computers are used for self-driving vehicle development. DGX systems are used for training advanced AI models and building a robust software stack in the cloud, and the Omniverse platform running on the Nvidia OVX system are used systems for simulation and validation. The combination of these three parts of the business for automotive development currently constitute $5bn of revenue, says Kani.
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