Venture Beat reports that Aquantia, Bosch, Continental, Nvidia, and Volkswagen have all come together in self-driving harmony. To ensure fast networking in the up-and-coming technology of self-driving vehicles, these five companies have formed the Networking for Autonomous Vehicles (NAV) Alliance, based out of San Jose, California.
Analyst firm Raymond James claims that chips for autonomous vehicles are expected to generate a $30 billion market by 2030. Self-driving cars, considering they have to process an increasing number of high-resolution sensors, cameras, and processing engines at faster speeds, require first-class, efficient in-vehicle networking solutions. Aquantia’s chips, which are currently the center of this growing chip market, enable multi-gig ethernet networking that can transfer data at a rate of up to 10 gigabits a second, which is necessary in technologies that need to process lots of data really quickly.
“Redundant and diverse AI algorithms are the key to level 5 automation (the highest level of self-driving cars, where humans are mere passengers),” said James Hodgson, senior analyst for autonomous driving at ABI Research, in a statement. “However, the volume of data generated by multiple types of sensors (camera, radar, lidar, ultrasound) can reach 32 terabytes every 8 hours — that level of data transfer calls for a new breed of ultra-high-speed networks, including multi-gig ethernet. The NAV alliance will catalyze the development of a reliable next generation of networking platform for self-driving cars.”
This alliance plans to work together to develop networking architecture based on engine control units (ECUs), central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), high-definition cameras, sensors, gateways, and storage devices that are connected through a high-speed, multi-gigabit ethernet network that works to move data throughout the vehicle securely and reliably.
“Aquantia has been driving the multi-gig ethernet revolution in other markets for several years,” said Amir Bar-Niv, vice president of marketing for strategic markets at Aquantia, in a statement. “Now, the in-vehicle network for autonomous driving requires a level of high-bandwidth functionality that was previously the domain of the most demanding datacenter applications. The creation of the NAV Alliance and the focus on multi-gig ethernet will help drive strong industry standards that can ultimately change the role of transportation in society.”
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