Qualcomm's Snapdragon Ride Flex Platform Is Ready To Help Car Digital Cockpits Fly

On Wednesday, Qualcomm unveiled the automotive industry's first scalable family of SoCs to simultaneously support digital cockpit technologies and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). The Qualcomm Snapdragon Ride Flex System-on-Chip (SoC) was announced as the latest addition to the company's growing Snapdragon Digital Chassis product portfolio.

The Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC announced at CES 2023 from Qualcomm is engineered to support mixed-criticality workloads across heterogenous compute resources, allowing for the digital cockpit, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and automated driving (AD) functions to co-exist, powered by a single SoC platform. The company notes it's designed to meet the absolute highest level of automotive safety regulations, and enables a hardware architecture to support isolation, freedom from interference, and quality-of-service for specific ADAS functions. It comes equipped with a dedicated Automotive Safety Integrity Level D safety island.

The Flex SoC pre-integrates a software platform that supports multiple systems operating concurrently, along with hypervisor enablement with isolated virtual machines, and real-time operating systems (RTOS) with an Automotive Open System Architecture that meets the mixed workload requirements of driver assistance safety systems, digital reconfigurable clusters, infotainment systems, driver monitoring systems, and park-assist systems.

"We continue to remain at the forefront of automotive compute innovation, and as we enter the era of Software Defined Vehicles, the Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC family defines a new setpoint for high-performance power-optimized mixed-criticality architectures," proclaimed Nakul Duggal, Senior Vice President and GM, automotive, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC is compatible with the broader portfolio of SoCs within Snapdragon Digital Chassis Platform. It is optimized for performance scaleability, ranging from entry-level to premium, high-end central-compute systems, while providing the flexibility to automakers to choose an appropriate performance point for their particular vehicle tiers. This capability gives automakers the ability to realize complex cockpit use-cases and next generation driving experiences.

The Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC can also serve as in-vehicle central-compute platform to power next-generation Software Defined Vehicle solutions. The SoC is supported by a cloud-native automotive software development workflows, which include support for virtual platform simulation that can be integrated as part of in-cloud development operations and machine learning operations infrastructure.

The company's Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC is sampling now and has a projected production start at the beginning of 2024.