NXP Semiconductors and Kalray join hands to develop an intelligent, highly parallel automotive SoC platform for level 2 and 3 autonomous cars.

The two chip makers said at CES 2019 trade show that they have signed a strategic alliance to jointly address strong market requirements for automotive-grade, highly parallelism, intelligent, and more importantly safety-critical  SoC platform.

The strategic alliance comes at a time when safety concerns on autonomous driving platform are mounting, as many of pilot or experimental self-driving car projects prove safety-prone, often going awry in their road tests.

Both of the two chip makers will work together on the integration of Kalray’s MPPA (massively parallel process array) processors into NXP’s BlueBox, an embedded autonomous driving platform to design and tape out the first sample of the SoC chip.

The BlueBox is a high-performance S32 processor coming built with safety critical ASIL D and ASIL B capabilities.

Kalray’s MPPA is a highly parallel multi-purpose processor array that comes built with a multiple array of processors and RAM memories.

The chip is a sort of a hybrid architecture of basic computational processors and functional processors that is not only good at performing basic arithmetic and logic ic computational task. But it also processes well security protocols like encryption and decryption standards, safety features and software stacks.

The MPPA has 288 64-bit architecture cores, 128 crypto co-processors, and 2MB shared memory block , so that it can process multiple of data-intensive audio and video data for machine aspects of video and audio perception.

As it is a processor-centric design architecture, the to-be-combined SoC will be so scalable and so flexible that it can evolve into a solution for level 4 and level 5 autonomous driving.