Safer Roads: Aurora Labs’ AI Meets Infineon’s AURIX TC4x MCUs

Infineon Technologies and Aurora Labs have joined forces to increase automotive safety by introducing AI-based solutions. These innovations elevate critical automotive components’ long-term reliability and safety, including steering, braking, and airbags. By combining Aurora Labs’ Line-of-Code Intelligence (LOCI) AI technology with Infineon’s 32-bit TriCore™ AURIX™ TC4x family of microcontrollers (MCUs), the collaboration wants to usher in a new era of predictive maintenance for vehicles.

This partnership aims to empower automotive manufacturers to deliver vehicles with enhanced safety, reliability, and performance throughout their lifespan – thus increasing customer satisfaction and reducing recalls and other issues simultaneously. This could have repercussions on car manufacturers’ bottom lines.

The solution also seeks to provide real-time monitoring and response to software failures at both MCU and ECU (Electronic Control Unit) levels. One of the objectives is to facilitate the development of safer automotive systems strictly adhering to the ASIL-D standards (Automotive Safety Integrity Level D).

“We have partnered with Infineon to ensure an improved driver experience based on predictive safety maintenance using AI capability. Our solution streamlines OEM software development at lines-of-code and hardware peripheral resolution to enable them to develop safer systems in accordance with ASIL-D,” said Zohar Fox, CEO and Co-founder of Aurora Labs.

Here, the AURIX TC4x Parallel Processing Unit (PPU) functions as an AI accelerator and operates independently to ensure it does not use the resources of the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) applications running on the CPU. This allows for the parallel execution of AI-based predictive maintenance processes without altering the performance of other vehicle functionalities.

Aurora Labs’ LOCI AI technology enables precise and proactive detection of software failures at the line-of-code level. It can also tell developers which logic block of the SoC was involved. The collaboration ensures real-time monitoring and response to MCU- and ECU-level software failures that meet WP29 requirements.

“With the combination of Infineon’s proven AURIX MCUs, along with Aurora Labs’ software to prevent silent data corruption and software misbehavior in chipsets, our new solution gives car manufacturers and drivers an extended level of safety confidence for critical automotive applications such as steering, braking and airbags.” (Thomas Schneid, Senior Director Software, Partner and Ecosystem Management of Infineon Technologies.)

Infineon Technologies and Aurora Labs’ collaborative initiative could be a leap forward in predictive maintenance for automotive components. It should allow developers and car makers to detect problems early and in real-time, making potential instant remediation possible by resetting specific software or hardware states of an individual vehicle. If there are logs, they can be aggregated and analyzed offline to get a larger picture of a whole fleet.

The implementation of AI technology on Infineon’s AURIX TC4x MCUs might vastly improve safety standards in the automotive industry and could set a new benchmark for the development of safer and more reliable vehicles.

Eliane Fiolet
Categories: Transportation
Tags: AI (Artificial Intelligence), cars, connected cars, Infineon, safety