Automotive semiconductor solutions provider Renesas Electronics has introduced a new R-Car V3H system-on-chip (SoC) to be installed in automotive front cameras used in various categories of self-driving vehicles.

The new R-Car V3H SoC is said to offer better computer vision performance and has been optimised for stereo front-camera usage.

Renesas Electronics vice-president Jean-Francois Chouteau said: “The R-Car V3H specification and design was done by cooperating closely with front-camera market leaders to ensure we addressed the requirements of those leading innovations on autonomous driving systems.

“Besides featuring state-of-the-art computer vision performance at a very competitive system cost, what our customers like above all with R-Car-V3H is being able to keep the freedom to implement a front camera with their own differentiators and still benefit from scalable solutions between R-Car V3M and R-Car V3H.”

“The solution forms part of Renesas’ autonomy platform for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and automated driving (AD).”

The solution forms part of Renesas’ autonomy platform for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and automated driving (AD).

It leverages on the company’s concept of heterogeneous computer vision cores, based on IMP-X5+ image recognition engine and dedicated hardware accelerators to achieve advanced sensing capabilities.

IPs that are already used in the predecessor R-Car V3M, as well as a dual Image Signal Processor (ISP) will be used to convert camera sensor signals for image creation and recognition processing.

The re-usage of IPs ensures scalability, as well as reduces development time and system costs.

Furthermore, R-Car V3H requires a single LPDDR4 memory, saving additional system costs.

The prototype versions of the R-Car V3H SoC are expected to be available from the last quarter of this year, while mass production is scheduled to start from the third quarter of next year.