The Society of Automotive Engineers have defined the levels of driving automation as such:

The capabilities of adaptive SoCs such as Zynq® UltraScale+™ MPSoC and Versal® AI Edge span the entire continuum of the ADAS/AD domain controller markets to address the future integration of critical features. Adaptive XA SoC platforms optimally handle a growing number of complex safety-critical applications and addresses OEM and tier-1 suppliers' needs for computation latency, performance, power efficiency, and functional safety across sensors and domain controllers.

Fully autonomous vehicles including robotaxis and robotrucks require extremely reliable, high performance, power-efficient, adaptive computing. Adaptive XA SoCs provide the optimal balance of hardware accelerators tightly coupled with application software for integrated sensor data aggregation, compute acceleration, and scalar processing.

The data aggregation, pre-processing, and distribution (DAPD) role within a domain controller requires a heterogeneous set of processing engines to process the incoming sensor data – that role can be fulfilled by the adaptive XA Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC and Versal® AI Edge platforms. In DAPD, the adaptive XA SoC prepares the incoming sensor data to be processed and then distributed to other elements within the domain controller.

In a compute acceleration role of the domain controller, a key focus for OEMs and robotaxi developers is power-efficient, high-utilization ML inference. Whether it's traditional CV acceleration, CNN processing, or ML acceleration – each of these require an efficient use of TOPs for sensor data processing. The adaptive XA SoC platforms – especially Versal AI Edge – provide the highest AI performance/watt, delivering optimal compute performance. For more on our advantages in compute acceleration, read our White Paper >