Semiconductor Components Industries, LLC (ON Semiconductor) has announced that it will work with Hungarian autonomous vehicle technology Almotive in developing prototype sensor fusion platforms for automotive applications. The collaboration will help customers explore highly integrated solutions for future generations of sensor data conditioning hardware platforms.

The companies plan to develop a series of hardware platform demonstrators, combining ON Semiconductor's latest high definition (HD) camera and radar sensor and pre-processor chipsets and AImotive's expertise on advanced artificial intelligence (AI)-based perception algorithms, hardware acceleration, and simulation capabilities. The platforms will showcase the superior accuracy, robustness, and low latency of AI-based real-time sensor fusion and will employ AImotive's aiWare hardware Neural Network (NN) acceleration IP in field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based prototypes, as well as modules from its aiDrive software portfolio and its aiSim simulation environment.

It has become clear to many researchers, as well as automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and Tier1s, that future autonomous driving platforms will require the fusion of data from multiple different sensor types to achieve the necessary robustness and the highest quality results in all operating conditions. One approach gaining popularity is combining high resolution image sensors with advanced radar sensors to improve perception performance in all weather conditions.

ON Semiconductor has been offering the automotive sector its advanced products and solutions in imaging, radar, LiDAR, and ultrasonic sensing. Combined, and used with technologies offered by companies like AImotive, these are able to address future vehicle requirements for robust, high performance sensor fusion platforms that support advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving.

Davide Santo, Senior Director and General Manager, Automotive Radar Sensing Solutions, Intelligent Sensing Group at ON Semiconductor, said, "We recognize AImotive's considerable expertise and industry recognition in these technologies and more for autonomous driving. We believe the results of this collaboration will enable both companies to help customers deliver more advanced sensor fusion solutions to OEMs and Tier1s."