NXP Semiconductors has announced its third-generation radar processor family, the S32R47 — positioning it as ideal for everything from Level 2+ to Level 4 autonomous vehicles, when paired with its millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar transceivers.
“The S32R47 can efficiently process three times, or more, antenna channels in real time than today’s production solutions,” claims NXP’s Meindert van den Beld of the company’s third-generation radar processor range. “It enables improved imaging radar resolution, sensitivity, and dynamic range — required by demanding autonomous driving use cases — while still meeting the stringent power and system cost targets set by OEMs [Original Equipment Manufacturers] for volume production.”
NXP has unveiled its third-generation radar processor, the S32R47 — with enough power to run on-device AI and ML models. (📷: NXP Semiconductors)
The new parts, NXP claims, deliver twice the processing power than their second-generation equivalents, with a multi-core radar processing system capable of producing denser point-cloud representations alongside enhanced algorithms targeting next-generation advanced driver assistant systems (ADAS) — delivering, the company says, better separability of objects, improved reliability of detection, and more accurate classification of objects including vulnerable road users and lost cargo. Despite this, the chip footprint is reduced by 38 percent, the company says.
Inside that compact chip is a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor cluster alongside three pairs of Arm Cortex-M7 cores running in lockstep as a real-time processing subsystem — enough power, NXP says, to run machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms for tasks including direction of arrival (DoA) and object classification. There’s 8MB of internal static RAM (SRAM) memory, two CAN FD buses, three 2.5-gigabit-Ethernet connections, and dedicated hardware blocks for fast Fourier transform (FFT) and floating-point processing. The chip includes four MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) inputs, and meets ASIL ISO 26262 ASIL B(D) requirements for functional safety.
The new parts are now sampling to “lead customers,” NXP has confirmed, with no word yet on pricing and general availability. More information is available on the company website.
