Ambarella, Inc., an edge AI semiconductor company, has won GOLD in the recently completed 2023 Leap Awards for product innovation.
The LEAP Awards celebrate the most innovative and forward-thinking products in design engineering. Ambarella won in the category of embedded computing, which covers microcontrollers (MCUs), microprocessors (MPUs), or other custom-designed chips, and supporting software in ROM (Read Only Memory) that comprise embedded computing.
Also included in this category are development tools and operating systems, computer boards, systems, and components, storage, and wired and wireless connectivity, including IoT and IIoT.
Ambarella’s winning entry was for its Centrally Processed 4D Imaging Radar Architecture for Autonomous Mobility Systems
The company launched the world’s first centralized 4D imaging radar architecture, which allows both central processing of raw radar data and deep, low-level fusion with other sensor inputs — including cameras, lidar, and ultrasonics. This breakthrough architecture provides greater environmental perception and safer path planning in AI-based ADAS and L2+ to L5 autonomous driving systems.
It features Ambarella’s Oculii radar technology, including the only AI software algorithms that dynamically adapt radar waveforms to the surrounding environment, providing high angular resolution of 0.5 degrees, an ultra-dense point cloud up to 10s of thousands of points per frame and a long detection range up to 500+ meters.
All of this is achieved with an order of magnitude fewer antenna MIMO channels, which reduces the data bandwidth and achieves significantly lower power consumption than competing 4D imaging radars.
The LEAP Awards’ judges commented: “An approach that is a departure from the norm in autonomous mobility systems, allowing for better environmental and path perception. A leap forward in integrating a broad range of optical, location, lidar, and radar technologies.”
To create this unique, cost-effective new architecture, Ambarella optimized the Oculii algorithms for its CV3 AI domain controller SoC family and added specific radar signal processing acceleration. The CV3’s industry-leading AI performance per watt offers the high compute and memory capacity needed to achieve high radar density, range, and sensitivity.
Additionally, a single CV3 can efficiently provide high-performance, real-time processing for perception, low-level sensor fusion and path planning, centrally and simultaneously, within autonomous vehicles and robots.
“No other semiconductor and software company has advanced in-house capabilities for both radar and camera technologies, as well as AI processing,” said Fermi Wang, president and CEO of Ambarella. “This expertise allowed us to create an unprecedented centralized architecture that combines our unique Oculii radar algorithms with the CV3’s industry-leading domain control performance per watt to efficiently enable new levels of AI perception, sensor fusion, and path planning that will help realize the full potential of ADAS, autonomous driving and robotics.”
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