SEOUL, South Korea & SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Samsung Electronics and Ambarella, Inc. have teamed up to bring advanced semiconductor technology to Ambarella’s newly announced CV3-AD685 automotive AI central domain controller. Samsung’s Foundry business is providing its 5-nanometer (nm) process technology to Ambarella to transform the next generation of autonomous driving vehicle safety systems. The collaboration will bring new levels of AI processing performance, power and reliability.
The CV3-AD685 is the first production version of Ambarella’s CV3-AD family of automotive AI central domain controllers. Tier-1 automotive suppliers have already announced their solutions using the CV3-AD system-on-chip (SoC) product family. Samsung’s 5nm process technology is optimized for automotive-grade semiconductors, with advanced IP and extremely tight process controls for exceptional reliability and outstanding traceability.
Ambarella will rely on Samsung’s 5nm process maturity, which is backed by the company’s extensive experience in automotive foundry process, IP, and service package development. This will enable manufacturers to create cutting-edge innovations in assisted and automated mobility.
Fermi Wang, President and CEO at Ambarella, said, “Samsung’s proven automotive process technology allows us to bring new levels of AI acceleration, systems integration, and power efficiency to ADAS and L2+ through L4 autonomous vehicles.”
The CV3-AD685 SoC integrates Ambarella’s next-generation CVflow® AI engine, which includes neural network processing that is 20 times faster than the previous generation of Ambarella’s CV2 SoCs. It also provides general-vector and neural-vector processing capabilities to deliver the overall performance required for full autonomous driving (AD) stack processing, including computer vision, 4D imaging radar, deep sensor fusion, and path planning.
Sang-Pil Sim, Executive Vice President and Head of Foundry Corporate Planning at Samsung Electronics, said, “Samsung brings 5nm EUV FinFET technology to automotive applications for unprecedented ADAS and vision processor performance.”
The CV3-AD685 is the first in the CV3-AD product family to use Samsung’s 5nm process. It features advanced image processing, a dense stereo and optical flow engine, ARM® Cortex® A78AE and R52 CPUs, an automotive GPU for visualizations, and a hardware security module (HSM). It has an “algorithm first” architecture that provides support for the entire autonomous-driving software stack.
The CV3-AD family, built specifically for ADAS, complements a wide range of solutions for assisted driving, while advancing vehicle automation. The integrated CV3-AD685 SoC enables information from various sensors to be fused for robust L2+ to L4 autonomous driving. Samsung Foundry’s industry-leading process technology and advanced 3D-packaging solutions are powering many of the latest mobile, HPC, and automotive solutions.
Samsung’s 5nm process is also backed by the Samsung Advanced Foundry Ecosystem (SAFE™) program. The SAFE™ program ensures close collaboration between Samsung Foundry, ecosystem partners, and customers to deliver robust SoC designs based on certified key design components including Process Design Kits (PDK), reference flows with Design Methodologies (DM), a variety of Intellectual Properties (IP), and on-demand design support.
