Axera showcases intelligent driving chip innovation achievements at TSMC Open Innovation Platform® Ecosystem Forum

Release time:2024-05-28

On May 28, 2024, TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), a world-leading semiconductor manufacturing company, held the "2024 China Technology Symposium" in Shanghai, exploring the latest technologies and future prospects in the global semiconductor design and manufacturing fields. During the forum, TSMC also hosted the "Innovation Zone" exhibition.

As a close partner of TSMC, Axera was invited to participate in this technology symposium and the innovation exhibition, showcasing its innovative solutions based on the "Axera Auto" series of intelligent driving chips M55H and M76H, as well as related large model solutions based on AX650N. This demonstrated Axera's innovative development achievements in the automotive business and AI fields to global customers.

The Versatile M55H Chip

CMS+ADAS Integrated Solution Debuts

M55H is the first intelligent driving chip from "Axera Auto" and the fastest intelligent driving chip in the industry to achieve large-scale mass production and implementation. With outstanding comprehensive performance, M55H was mass-produced and installed on two best-selling models of new energy vehicle brands in 2023, and its overall shipment volume ranks second in the domestic intelligent driving chip market.

At this exhibition, "Axera Auto" not only showcased smart front-view all-in-one machines (for both passenger and commercial vehicles) based on the M55H chip, but also demonstrated a CMS (Camera Monitor System) + ADAS integrated solution model based on this chip.

This demonstration model consists of two external vehicle cameras and multiple screens.

This CMS system based on the Axera Auto M55H intelligent driving chip features real-time display of the images from the left and right cameras on the respective screens. Thanks to the M55 chip's leading AI-ISP image processing technology, this CMS system offers low-latency capabilities with high-quality images, delivering stable and excellent image performance, particularly in dark light enhancement, highlight suppression, full-color display, and HDR. Compared to traditional rearview mirrors, this significantly enhances convenience and safety.

The central long connected screen in the demonstration model shows the real-time perception images from the smart front-view all-in-one machine based on the M55H chip, which can detect and identify road vehicles, pedestrians, lane lines, road edges, traffic signs, and drivable areas. The M55H chip features low power consumption, high cost performance, maturity, reliability, safety, and ease of use, making it ideal for front-view all-in-one solution development.

The demonstration model showcases the all-round capabilities of the Axera Auto M55H chip, which can be applied not only to cost-effective ADAS front-view all-in-one machines but also to high-performance CMS systems. In the future, it can support more application scenarios such as DMS (Driver Monitoring System) and OMS (Occupant Monitoring System).

As Axera Auto's main shipment product, the M55H will be implemented in multiple production vehicles with different application scenarios in the future. It can be considered one of the most promising domestic intelligent driving chips in the current ADAS market.

The M76H Chip with Native Transformer Support

More Specialized, More Efficient

The M76H chip is Axera Auto's high-performance computing platform for advanced intelligent driving systems, offering 60 TOPS of computing power. It supports the deployment of high-speed NOA (Navigate on Autopilot) and urban memory driving functions, making it an essential computing platform for future parking and driving integrated systems.

Based on the anticipation of cutting-edge technologies, the M76H chip was designed with reserved space for supporting the Transformer architecture. This native support significantly enhances the competitiveness of M76H in the current Transformer technology boom.

At this exhibition, Axera Auto also brought the parking and driving integrated domain control development kit based on the M76H chip to the scene.

On this development kit, Axera's BEV reference algorithm can be run, including 3D vehicle/pedestrian detection, general obstacle detection, BEV lane line/road edge/traffic sign/drivable area detection, and elevation estimation.

Additionally, this solution is very developer-friendly, featuring a mature and efficient NPU toolchain supporting mainstream BEV/Transformer operators, an easy-to-use SDK efficiently supporting multiple perception pathways, and rich board-level resources for development verification (abundant sensor interfaces, etc.). In summary, it helps developers get started quickly, simplify development processes, and improve development efficiency.

Large Model Applications Based on AX650N Chip

Multiple Large Model Applications Debut

With the global explosion of AI large model technology and the emergence of various applications, the core foundation remains the AI chip.

At this technology exhibition, Axera also brought a development board based on its self-developed third-generation edge-side AI chip AX650N to demonstrate multiple open-source large models ported to it, including language large models and multimodal large models.

CLIP Model

A multimodal pre-trained large model that can perform text-to-image search, image-text mutual search, and assist with related multimodal tasks. It can also serve as an evaluation tool for text-to-image tasks. Through the CLIP model, searching becomes much simpler.

TinyLlama Model

An LLM (Large Language Model) that easily enables AI Agents. Additionally, with only 1.1B parameters,