Companies
20/09/2016

New Chip Fit for Driverless Cars Launched by U.K.’s Chip Designer ARM




With aim of securing its place at the heart of the burgeoning driverless vehicles industry, a new processor chip that is aimed to be used for driverless cars, was launched on Tuesday by  ARM, the British chip designer that is powering the global mobile phone industry with its chips.
 
The chip  that was developed and launched by ARM has the capability to work across a range of industries from autonomous vehicles to industrial and medical robotics and was it design is such that its primarily aim is to increase safety in increasingly complex systems as mentioned above.
 
ARM was recently bought over by Japan's SoftBank in a deal worth $32 billion in recently. 
 
In its first deal with the company, the chip has been licensed to Franco-Italian chipmaker and partner STMicroelectronics. It has been reported that it has been somewhere between 3 and 5 years that development work for the chip – called Cortex-R52 processor, was being conducted by ARM.
 
To ensure that the platform that holds complex function, as indicated above, is kept running well, the processor would help to keep the most critical software code separate. Such is the design of the processor, ARM said. Giving an example, ARM said that in the case of driverless or self driving cars, the work of the processor would help the automatic system in  the car to  improve the safety features if and when such a car wants to overtake, accelerate or break suddenly.
 
"If you have a piece of safety critical code, you want to be sure that nothing can interfere with that," John Ronco, VP Product Marketing, told the media describing the advantages of the new chip processor.
 
ARM is known for its range of chips and processors that allows the use of technology that drives nearly all smartphones including Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy. ARM is 26-year-old and is based in Cambridge in eastern England.
 
In recent years, another dimension that the global tech industry is very excited about and which may of the large companies are ardently pursing is the 'internet of things' - a network of devices, vehicles and building sensors that collect and exchange data. With the technological developments and its research work, ARM is all poised to play a central role in the shift of the tech industry to the 'internet of things'. This is also one of the reasons that Japan’s SoftBank showed so much interest in the company.
 
"What we see is that all of these systems have a similar technology platform, a similar framework in terms of what they're doing, and they have the same requirements in terms of having processors that can safely make decisions about what the system should do," Ronco said.
 
With the British government putting the autonomous or driverless cars market value at 900 billion pounds ($1.17 trillion) worldwide, this market is seen as the next big thing for the tech industry.
 
New car companies such as Tesla and technology firms such as Alphabet Inc's unit Google wants eventually to be able to deploy fully autonomous vehicles without human controls and  these firms are providing competition to the traditional automakers.
 
(Source:www.reuters.com) 

Christopher J. Mitchell
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