By John Bugailiskis
LAS VEGAS – Chipmaker Qualcomm unveiled its first ever autonomous driving solution, the Snapdragon Ride platform, which aims to power all levels of automated driving for autonomous cars as soon as 2023, at the Consumer Electronics Show this year.
The San Diego-based chipmaker already generates more than $600 million annually from automotive communications, telematics, and infotainment systems but company president Cristiano Amon also took the opportunity at its CES press conference to respond to critics that the rollout of next generation wireless standard 5G has been stalling.
“2020 is the year we really expect 5G to scale, and it’s moving faster than 4G, despite skepticism,” Amon said. He also predicted 5G will be adopted more quickly than 4G and estimated that 200 million 5G smartphones will be shipped in 2020.
Qualcomm claims its new Snapdragon Ride platform is one of the automotive industry’s most advanced, scalable and open autonomous driving solutions.
“Over the years, we have consistently demonstrated our prowess in large-scale deployment of high-performance and highly intelligent cockpit and connected car solutions that operate in power-constrained environments across virtually every class of vehicle,” Amon said.
“Today, we are pleased to be introducing our first-generation Snapdragon Ride platform, which is highly scalable, open, fully customizable and highly power optimized autonomous driving solution designed to address a range of requirements from NCAP to L2+ Highway Autopilot to Robo Taxis. Combined with our Snapdragon Ride Autonomous Stack, or an automaker or tier-1’s own algorithms, our platform aims at accelerating the deployment of high-performance autonomous driving to mass market vehicles,” added Nakul Duggal, senior vice-president, product management.
“We’ve spent the last several years researching and developing our new autonomous platform and accompanying driving stack, identifying challenges and gathering insights from data analysis to address the complexities automakers want to solve.”
Snapdragon Ride consists of three components: a system-on-chip (SoC), a safety accelerator system and software, and an autonomous driving software stack. The company expects its Ride platform to benefit all levels of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), from level 1 and level 2 systems that brake automatically and recognize traffic signs, through Level 4 and Level 5 systems that will drive autonomously navigate urban environments.
Amon also proclaimed that the “The 5G PC is now a reality” and unveiled the world’s first 5G PC, an ultraportable 3-in-1 Windows laptop, the Yoga 5G from Lenovo. The laptop leverages the Snapdragon 8cx 5G compute platform, which includes support for both millimeter wave and sub-6 GHz connections.
In further news it introduced the new Qualcomm Car-to-Cloud Service, the company’s first offering of an integrated, secure connected-car services suite for Qualcomm Snapdragon Automotive Cockpit Platforms and Qualcomm Snapdragon Automotive 4G and 5G Platforms.
The cloud service is designed to help automakers keep cockpit and telematics systems up-to-date, and future-proof vehicles by delivering the flexibility needed to activate features at any time. The Qualcomm Car-to-Cloud Service also provides automakers the opportunity to unlock new revenue streams throughout the lifecycle of a vehicle with over-the-air (OTA) updates, on-demand unlocking of features and pay-as-you-use services, as well as gather valuable vehicle and usage analytics.
