The concept of cockpit integration has been hot for a long time.
In a word, "cabin and driver integration" is to integrate the originally separated intelligent driving domain and intelligent cabin domain into one domain.
In February, NIO announced that the electronic and electrical architecture of its 2024 second-generation platform models will be upgraded from a domain control architecture to a central computing platform, in which the separation of intelligent cabin and intelligent driving will also be upgraded to cabin-driver integration. Previously, Leapmotor has also released the four-leaf clover architecture, announcing that it will realize the integration of the cockpit domain, intelligent driving domain, power domain, and body domain.
However, industry insiders said that the current cockpit fusion is not a real cockpit fusion, "some are only integrated in a box, or two boards, and some are integrated on one board, but the chips are still two." ”
What the industry really wants to achieve is to use a chip to support the ability of cockpit integration, and this depends on the successful mass production of the chip itself. At present, in addition to Nvidia Thor and Qualcomm Snapdragon Ride Flex, only Black Sesame Intelligence has released cross-domain fusion chip products.
In April 2023, the Wudang series C1200 was released. After a year, at the Beijing Auto Show in April 2024, the C1200 family production models C1236 and C1296 physical chips and solutions were exhibited for the first time.
Among them, C1236 is mainly aimed at single-chip high-end intelligent driving solutions, which can realize single-chip support for NOA driving and parking integration, and C1296 can support multi-domain integration solutions.
On the same day, Black Sesame Intelligence also announced that it had reached a strategic cooperation with JOYNEXT, and the two parties will jointly create a complete software solution for cabin and driver integration based on the C1200 series intelligent vehicle cross-domain computing chip platform. As the first cross-domain fusion chip product in China, can C1200 promote the popularization and application of cross-domain integration?
Cross-domain convergence is an industry trend
On the development path of cross-domain integration, the industry basically follows the direction of transitioning from One Box to One Board, and finally to One Chip. One Chip means that a single chip does all the functions.
One Box is a combination of the original two domains into one. One Board integrates two chips, Zhijia and Zhiban, on one board, which requires a higher design capability of the motherboard. At present, NIO's cross-domain solution is One Board, which integrates the intelligent driving chip and the cockpit chip on one board.
Either way, it means the reuse of hardware such as domain control and sensors, and the reduction of costs. The high level of integration can also reduce the amount of wiring harness, reducing the cost and reducing the weight of the whole vehicle.
In today's market environment, the prospect of cost reduction of cross-domain integration is obviously the main driving force to attract most car companies to enter the game.
Ding Ding, vice president of black sesame intelligent products, said in the exchange with Leifeng.com's "New Intelligent Driving" that at present, intelligence is still mainly concentrated in models of more than 200,000 yuan, but with the enhanced acceptance of intelligent driving experience in end users and the increase in assembly rate, the demand for intelligence will sink to 10-150,000 yuan level models. At this time, with the clarification of functional boundaries, integration is needed from the perspective of the chip industry to promote cost reduction.
Ding Ding believes that the direction of cross-domain integration and central computing will not change. "When market demand drives applications downward, it will push the technology side to achieve application maturity with less cost, lower resources, and less overhead. ”
Chip integration is the ultimate goal of cross-domain convergence. A single chip integrates the functions of previous autonomous driving, intelligent cockpit, body control, and other computing platforms, which can greatly reduce the cost of chip upgrades themselves.
For OEMs, higher levels of integration also mean fewer suppliers, which in turn reduces supply chain management costs.
At the functional level, cross-domain integration can also achieve better computing power allocation.
For example, in the case of NIO's central computing platform, ADAM, two chips are integrated on the same circuit board. Due to the use of central computing, the intelligent driving chip and the cockpit chip can be shared, that is, for the occupant recognition in the car, because the intelligent driving chip NVIDIA Orin is better at AI computing and image processing, the central computing platform can call Orin to process the occupant recognition task, and use the computing power of the cockpit chip for other more suitable functions, thereby improving the operation efficiency of the task.
When two chips are fused into one, a single chip integrates CPU, GPU, NPU, DSP, ISP, MCU, and data exchange capabilities, which can realize flexible calls more quickly and avoid wasting computing power.
In addition, cross-domain integration can promote faster and easier iteration of the overall software architecture, shorten development time, and provide users with a better functional experience.
A number of car companies and Tier 1 companies are developing solutions for cockpit and driver integration. For example, at CES 2024, Bosch unveiled a cross-domain computing platform that uses Qualcomm's Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC chip to enable numerous intelligent cockpit and intelligent driving functions.
Car companies, including Ideal, Zeekr, Nezha and BYD, have confirmed that they will use Nvidia's Drive Thor chip in new cars in the future, which is expected to be launched in 2025.
However, the maximum computing power of Nvidia Thor and Qualcomm Snapdragon has reached 2000TOPS, and the market for them is relatively more high-end.
In the mid-range market, which really has a higher demand for cost reduction and can increase volume, the current C1200 series of Black Sesame Intelligence is the first product designed for a single chip to achieve cross-domain functions.
Some industry insiders once commented to Leifeng.com's "New Intelligent Driving" that Shan Jizhang has a very accurate ability to predict the market. From A1000 to C1200, from the integration of driving and parking to the integration of cabin and driving, the overall product layout of Black Sesame Intelligence has stepped on the point in time.
At this year's Beijing Auto Show, Qualcomm also released a plan for the integration of cabin and driver with a number of cooperative companies. Cockpit integration has become a hot spot in the industry.
What hurdles should be crossed in the development of cross-domain convergence chips?
But it's not easy to really achieve cabin and driver integration. Especially in the development of cross-domain chips, many problems need to be solved.
An industry insider said to Xinzhijia: "The direction of cabin and driver integration is definitely right in the long run, but there are still some difficulties in the short term. ”
Although the industry is very hot, there is no real One Chip solution yet.
Wang Fei has been deeply involved in the design of the chip, he explained to the new intelligent driving, the development of cross-domain chips is much more complex than a separate intelligent driving chip, in addition to the basic intelligent driving functions, but also need to increase entertainment, instrument display and other capabilities, equivalent to the original only one function, now to do three functions, and all have to meet the requirements of car regulations.
Intelligent driving emphasizes perception, planning, and decision-making, which requires high NPU computing power, while cockpit chips need to process a large amount of image content and run applications such as large-scale 3D games, which have higher requirements for GPU capabilities. Cross-domain chips need to comprehensively consider these capabilities and adjust the overall architecture.
In addition, according to Li Ming, a senior on-board chip practitioner, the occupation of resources by cockpit chips is a dynamic process. If you just drive and listen to music, it takes up very few resources. However, if multiple applications on the car machine are enabled at the same time, it will occupy more resources.
Intelligent driving is different, its logic is only two states, on and off, once turned on, it will occupy a lot of resources. Therefore, the intelligent driving chip pursues stability and certainty.
Therefore, in order to balance the different requirements of different domains for chips, it is necessary to consider how to integrate different architectures when making cross-domain fusion chips.
In addition, the requirements for the safety level of the cockpit chip and the intelligent driving chip are also different.
It doesn't matter if there is a problem with the cockpit function in use. At most, the black screen is not to watch movies, not to listen to music, and to use mobile phones without navigation. However, if the intelligent driving function is wrong, it can be life-threatening.
Therefore, the intelligent driving chip usually requires the functional safety level of ASIL-D, and the cockpit only needs to achieve ASIL-B.
When two functions are integrated into one chip, they also need to be isolated to achieve different levels of security. This is also the challenge that the cockpit fusion chip needs to face.
To this end, Black Sesame Intelligence has developed Extreme Speed Data Exchange Infrastructure (ESDE) for the C1200 family, which can isolate the data management required for different FuSa (functional safety) level computing, and realize the isolation of different computing types and data across domains while meeting the security level. At the same time, ESDE can also process large amounts of data with low latency, making full use of computing power.
In addition, after the cockpit chip and the intelligent driving chip are integrated into a single chip, the scale of the chip will also be greatly expanded.
On the one hand, this will lead to an increase in power consumption, and at the same time, the probability of chip errors will also increase significantly as the complexity of the chip increases.
Therefore, in the mass production stage, compared with single-function chips, cross-domain chips also need to have better control over yield. This puts forward higher requirements for chip design and manufacturing.
Black Sesame Intelligence is ahead of the curve
At present, the Black Sesame Intelligent C1200 series products have completed the complete test after tape-out, and the functional performance verification has been successful, becoming the first cross-domain fusion chip product successfully developed in China.
A number of intelligent driving companies told the new intelligent driving that they have developed cross-domain solutions based on the Black Sesame Intelligent C1200 series.
The C1236 and C1296 chips unveiled at the Beijing Auto Show are manufactured on a 7nm process, equipped with Arm Cortex-A78AE automotive-grade high-performance CPU cores and Mali-G78AE automotive-grade high-performance GPU cores, and have passed ISO 26262 ASIL-D Ready product certification.
In terms of manufacturing, the two chips adopt automotive standards in the whole process from chip IP selection, architecture design, production to packaging.
In addition to the traditional intelligent driving and cockpit functions, the C1200 series also has a wide range of applications. A single chip can support functions that originally required different chips, including electronic rearview mirror systems, integrated driving and parking, vehicle computing, infotainment systems, smart headlights, cabin perception systems and other computing scenarios, which will greatly save costs for OEMs.
Among them, C1296, as a highly integrated vehicle-mounted cross-domain computing chip, can realize the integration of cabin and parking at low cost, and flexibly meet the needs of complex and changeable scenarios.
The C1236 integrates sensor access, algorithm acceleration, data forwarding of vehicle Ethernet and CAN bus, 4K display, etc., which can realize the integration of NOA-level driving and parking with a single chip.
In terms of core technology, Black Sesame Intelligence continues to upgrade and optimize the self-developed DynamAI NPU, which can not only support traditional CNN algorithms, but also carry out in-depth optimization for Transformer+BEV and large language models, which can greatly improve memory efficiency and data processing flexibility, reduce DDR bandwidth requirements, and support unstructured sparse processing, enhance vector operation and custom operator acceleration functions.
According to the official statement of Black Sesame Intelligence, the third-generation NPU of Black Sesame Intelligence will be equipped with A2000, which can do hardware acceleration and efficient adaptation for various mainstream high-end self-driving algorithms for a long time in the future, improve the convenience of customer development and reduce the customer's investment cost of DDR.
At the same time, Black Sesame Intelligence has also co-optimized the compiler and tool chain to ensure that the hardware performance is maximized.
Its development platform and tools have achieved a family-oriented design, and a set of SDKs can meet the needs of various scenarios, saving development time and reducing subsequent long-term maintenance costs. For customers, this also undoubtedly reduces the difficulty of development and the threshold for use.
Yan Qing's company is using Black Sesame Intelligence's chips for development, and he believes that "Black Sesame Intelligence's design architecture can effectively solve the needs of customers, and their information security, functional safety and tool chain are also relatively perfect, and the overall coordination is relatively good." ”
At present, Black Sesame Intelligent C1200 series chips have been designated by FAW and other car companies, and have reached strategic cooperation with Nullmax, Junlian Zhihe and other companies to jointly develop complete software and hardware solutions.
In addition to the C1200 series, at the auto show, Black Sesame Intelligence also revealed that its Huashan series A2000 family will be officially launched this year. It is reported that the A2000 will be a high-computing power chip that can support high-level autonomous driving functions.
With the two product lines of Huashan and Wudang series, Black Sesame Intelligence has a clear layout in the future intelligent market.
Ding Ding said that according to the current development, the C1200 is expected to be on the car in 2025.
"The maturity window of cross-domain chips should be in 2026 and 2027. First of all, we think this is doing the right thing, and we hope to play a positive role in promoting the industry. I hope that we will take this step early, take a steady step, accumulate experience, and form a technical and commercial advantage. ”
Wang Fei, Li Ming, and Yan Qing are pseudonyms in the article