British chip technology firm Arm Holdings is joining with General Motors and Toyota to establish common computing systems for self-driving cars, an effort the companies hope will speed development of the technology.
Arm supplies the underlying technology for the processors found in today’s smart phones but does not make chips itself. Its ties to the automotive industry dates back to the late 1990s, when carmakers began to add computer chips to vehicles for functions like engine control and diagnostics.
On Tuesday the company said it was helping to create the Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium, or AVCC, along with the two carmakers and industry suppliers Bosch, Denso and Continental.
The AVCC will be an independent group funded by membership fees from the companies that join. Arm officials said its work will be open to non-members.
The group’s first task will be to establish a common computing architecture. That effort aims to make it easier for car companies to write software that will work on chips from different vendors, similar to how Microsoft Corp Windows-based software works on processors from Intel Corp or Advanced Micro Devices.
With car and technology companies working on self-driving vehicles, analysts expect the number of chips in cars to expand. But the current test vehicles being used to develop self-driving software are using the same kind of large, electricity-hungry chips found in data centers.
Across the industry, chip firms and carmakers agree that the power diet and size of the gear must be cut drastically to fit into cars for the general public, to perhaps a tenth or less the levels of current systems.
“The massive amount of technological innovation required to power fully self-driving vehicles at scale requires collaboration at an industry level,” Massimo Osella, chairman of the new group’s board and a lab group manager for research and development at GM, said in a statement.
MIKE OCHONMA
