Texas Instruments (TI) (NASDAQ: TXN) is extending its Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) and autonomous vehicle System-on-Chip (SoC) portfolio, with the availability of a new development board and a rapidly growing ecosystem. RT-RK, an embedded services and product development company globally recognized for their digital signal processing software development, along with TI are announcing the availability of the RT-RK Alpha development board. Using the TDAx SOC, the development board supports development of ADAS applications such as advanced warning systems, active control systems and semi-autonomous driving.  In addition, customers using the RT-RK have access to a broad TDAx SOC ecosystem to enable quick time to market with TDAx-based hardware and software solutions.

Powering the new ADAS to autonomous vehicle development board

At the core of the development board are three of TI’s TDA2x processors, which enable a development system capable of running up to six independent ADAS applications simultaneously at 24W. The development board was developed to help customers meet the high performance requirements necessary to develop ADAS or autonomous solutions by minimizing the effort to evaluate the full capabilities of multiple TDA2x SoCs. It supports 10 sensor inputs, parallel ADAS application execution and production ready ADAS algorithms and is based on TI’s Vision SDK. The board was designed to support multiple applications on a single board, and with provisions to add differentiating algorithms, it is ideal for developing autonomous vehicle solutions.  
“Working with TI, we are able to bring a unique platform to the ADAS and autonomous vehicle market. For the first time, there is an option to connect all vehicle cameras on one ECU. Through workload balancing across three TDA2x, the Alpha board is a powerful platform for level-3 and level- 4 autonomous vehicle systems,” said Tomislav Maruna, head of the automotive business unit, RT-RK.

Strong and expanding TDAx ecosystem

The TDA2x SoC is a member of TI’s scalable family of processors that share a common hardware and software architecture for ADAS applications such as camera-based front (mono/stereo), rear, surround view and night vision, plus multi-mode radar and sensor fusion systems. The TDA2x supports video processing algorithms and with multiple SOCs optimizes the processing load.

TI’s ecosystem network covers a range of technical expertise including:

• Hardware: multi-sensor imaging, fusion and autonomous development boards
• Production ready algorithms: front camera and surround view
• Production ready imaging support: image pipeline, wide dynamic range (WDR) and flicker mitigation

TI’s TDAx SoCs are differentiated by a heterogeneous architecture which integrates purpose-built hardware accelerators (HWA) such as image signal processors (ISP), embedded vision engines (EVEs) and digital signal processors (DSPs), that are optimized to perform highly complex imaging and signal processing with low power consumption. To meet performance and quality requirements while reducing development efforts, TI works with third parties that have solutions and expertise with the TDAx HWA. Using the extensive ecosystem network, customers can leverage highly optimized algorithms already implemented on the TI’s HWAs to bring products to market faster.

As evidence, below is an overview of a select group of ecosystem partners and their solutions, and if applicable, where to see their solutions at Electronica:

• “We have a strong focus on the automotive and transportation industry, developing advanced driver assistance, connectivity, and powertrain solutions for new technology and innovative features in the automobile. In the ADAS domain, with experience in system engineering, image processing, sensor fusion, vehicle controls, AUTOSAR integration, and end to end validation – KPIT is one stop for most engineering solutions. We are pleased with our collaboration with TI to bring the best in class hardware/software combination for the industry,” said Rajeeb Nath, senior vice president and head of Automotive & Transportation, KPIT.
• “FotoNation is proud to be a strategic partner to TI, and contributor of industry leading camera technology to the TDAx ecosystem, in support of ADAS applications for the automotive industry.  Our collaborative efforts have enabled FotoNation to deliver flawless eye tracking, iris recognition and face detection, recognition and tracking technologies, which are at the heart of advanced driver monitoring systems (DMS) for the automotive industry,” Sumat Mehra, Senior Vice President, and General Manager, FotoNation.
• “D3 Engineering is supporting dozens of product development programs around the world with our DesignCore™ platforms for ADAS,” said Jerome Barczykowski, Autonomous Systems Product Line Manager, D3 Engineering. “Our clients are able to concentrate on their own core expertise and get their products to market faster by relying on D3’s proven reference designs and our expertise with TI’s ADAS technology.” 
• “We developed the complete set of EuroNCAP camera software components, such as Traffic Sign Detection, Lane Detection, Light Source Detection, Pedestrian and Vehicle Detection.  These algorithms are ready to be used on the TDA platform. The TI product portfolio is a great fit to our scalable business model. The TDAx SoC system performance enabled us to realize a very short time to market.”, says Kay Talmi, Managing Director, Hella Aglaia Mobile Vision GmbH.
• “We were able to implement our LED flicker mitigation solution, which reduces the flickering of LED lights across (PWM) frequencies, even if different frequencies are present from different light sources and moving objects, on the TDAx platform.  This solution targets camera monitor systems (CMS) for the emerging mirror replacement cameras and surround view applications. This was accomplished with cost-efficiency and with a short time-to-market,” said Young-Hun Kluge, VP Sales, Dream Chip.

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