Date: 20/03/2022

Renesas unveils R-Car V4H for AD Level 2+ / Level 3

The new R-Car V4H system on chip (SoC) from Renesas for central processing in advanced driver-assistance (ADAS) and automated driving delivers up to 34 TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second), enabling high-speed image recognition and processing of surrounding objects by automotive cameras, radar, and lidar.

The R-Car V4H is designed to deliver high processing performance per watt by using specific IP and expert HW optimization. It targets the highest volume zones of automated driving: Level 2+ and Level 3.

R-Car V4H supports development of cost-competitive, single-chip, ADAS electric control units (ECUs). These control units may support driving systems appropriate for automated driving Levels 2+ and Level 3, including full NCAP 2025 features. The R-Car V4H also supports surround view and automatic parking functions with impressive 3D visualization effects such as realistic rendering.

“We have seen excellent customer response to our R-Car V3H and V3M with high volume production, and we are pleased to extend our offering with the R-Car V4H,” said Naoki Yoshida, Vice President, Automotive Digital Products Marketing Division at Renesas. “As Renesas expands its scalable R-Car portfolio, we expect to see cutting-edge ADAS adopted in all vehicle types, from mid-range to entry-level.”

Winning Combo Solution Supports the Industry’s Stringent ASIL Requirements

Regarding ISO 26262 functional safety, the SoC development process targets ASIL D systematic capability for all safety relevant IP. The signal processing portion of the R-Car V4H is expected to achieve ASIL B and D metrics for the real time domain.

Renesas supports powering of this chip by its own RAA271041 pre-regulator and the RAA271005 PMIC. This enables a highly reliable power supply for the R-Car V4H and peripheral memories from the 12V supply of the vehicle battery. These features enable low power operation while targeting ASIL D compliance for systematic and random hardware faults at very low BOM cost. This helps to minimize the effort of hardware and software development while reducing design complexity, cost, and time to market.

Renesas is providing R-Car V4H software development kit (SDK) for device evaluation, and software development including deep learning. The SDK offers full functionality for machine learning development, and optimization of embedded systems for performance, power efficiency, and functional safety. Complete simulation models are available, and the Renesas operating system agnostic software platform enables easier development of the software-defined car.

In case of development from scratch, Fixstars’ Genesis platform enables engineers to evaluate R-Car from anywhere via their cloud solution and can provide quick and easy CNN benchmark results.

Key Features of R-Car V4H:

Four Arm Cortex-A76 at 1.8 Ghz for a total of 49KDMIPS of general compute for ADAS / AD applications
Three lockstep Arm Cortex-R52 cores at 1.4 Ghz, for a total of 9KDMIPS to support ASIL D real-time operation and eliminate the need for external microcontrollers
Dedicated Deep Learning & Computer Vision I/Ps with overall performance of 34 TOPS
Image Signal Processor (ISP) with parallel processing for machine and human vision
Image renderer (IMR) for fisheye distortion correction or other mathematical operation
Graphic processor Unit (GPU) AXM-8-256 @ 600MHz, for a total of over 150 GFLOPS
Dedicated automotive Interfaces: CAN, Ethernet AVB, TSN and FlexRay
Two fourth generation PCIe interfaces

Availability: Samples of the R-Car V4H SoC are available now, with mass production scheduled for the second quarter of 2024. More information is available at renesas.com/r-car-V4H.