Renesas Development Platform Targets Advanced Mobility Technologies

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Renesas Electronics America Corp. unveiled a fleet of prototype cars this week that it hopes will serve as an open platform for suppliers to develop next-generation technologies for autonomous and connected cars.

Based on Renesas’ autonomous driving development platform, the vehicles include forward camera image recognition, 3-D surround view, “sensor fusion” and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication functions. Future enhancements are expected to include various safety, security, powertrain, human-to-machine interfaces and cockpit systems.

Renesas says the vehicles can be used by sensor makers, system integrators, software developers and other subject experts as a working toolbox in real-world environments where they can collaborate, validate, experiment and benchmarking new ideas. This will reduce design risk and accelerate time to market through pre-testing and integration, the company says.

The semiconductor supplier, which was formed in 2010 by the merger of NEC Electronics and Renesas Electronics, is collaborating with Arada Systems, Cogent Embedded, eTrans Systems, Harbrick and NewFoundry on the project.

The test fleet uses Harbrick’s PolySync platform, which enables accelerated development of autonomous driving algorithms such as sensor integration of the vehicle’s forward camera, V2X box and inertial measurement unit with five radar and eight laser-based radar devices.

Vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication is integrated into the fleet of cars by eTrans and Arada, using two channels of 5.9 GHz DSRC communication. Cogent Embedded provides the lane-detection camera and 3D surround view system.

All systems are powered by Renesas’ system-on-chip technologies.