Will Altera FPGAs Drive Your Future Audi?

by Kevin Morris - Electronic Engineering Journal, Feb. 06, 2015 – 

Letting go of the steering wheel for the first time will be a terrifying milestone for most drivers. As engineers, we have all known for years that self-driving and assisted-driving cars were coming, and as a group we have a unique appreciation for the myriad challenges - both technical and social - that lie between us and safer roads.

On the technical side, it is clear that a robust, safe self-driving system requires the aggregation of massive amounts of data from a diverse array of sensors, and the software that processes those inputs will be complex, performance-demanding, and in a high state of flux for many years. That means we need an unfortunate combination of massive sensor aggregation bandwidth, raw data processing, and algorithmic compute performance that can not easily be solved by any current combination of conventional processors and ASSPs.

It's time to take some FPGAs to driving school.

As this article goes to virtual press, an Audi A7 is self-driving its way along a 550-mile route from the San Francisco Bay area to the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. So, if you're sitting back in the safety of your lab chair thinking that all this is a rhetorical exercise for some unlikely future scenario - well, welcome to the future.

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are the next big wave in automotive technology. Features of ADAS range from emergency automatic braking to adaptive cruise control and lane departure warnings to full-blown auto-drive capabilities. Most systems rely on a distributed architecture - different modules are added for each new capability, and those electronic control modules communicate with each other using various networking standards. Audi, however, is using a centralized control box that aggregates and processes all sensor data for all of the various ADAS features such as parking, night vision, lane departure, and even fully automated driving, which Audi calls "piloted driving."

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