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September 2015 • The PCB Magazine 23 to meet the challenges and needs of the 21 st cen- tury's automotive market and not only the hard- ware needs, but also software to make maximum use of the rapidly advancing hardware. I believe that the expansion into this mar- ket started with the first Tegra chip. Tegra is a full system on a single chip for mobile/portable devic- es; it integrates a GPU with a central processing unit (CPU) as well as the bridge and memory controller cir- cuits. It's kind of a computer on a chip. Tegra is now well- established in the portable device market and the lat- est version is quite advanced from the original Tegra 1. If you consider what is needed to power a car of the near future, however, you need more than a chip; you basi- cally need a kind of super computer in a cigar box. Hence, you need the NVIDIA Drive PX to power the sys- tems in the self-driving auto of the near future. It is liter- ally a mini supercomputer. Their description of it is: "NVIDIA DRIVE™ PX self-driving Car Com- puter—the DRIVE PX platform is based on the NVIDIA® Tegra® X1 processor, enabling smarter, more sophisticated advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and paving the way for the autonomous car. Tegra X1 delivers an as- tonishing 1.3 gigapixels/second throughput— enough to handle 12 two-Megapixel cameras at frame rates up to 60 fps for some cameras. It is equipped with 10 GB of DRAM memory and combines surround Computer Vision (CV) technology, extensive deep learning training, and over-the-air updates to transform how cars see, think, and learn." The X-1 Tegra has the power of a super com- puter from the year 2000; the latest unit they showed me has two of them, thus twice that power. NVIDIA says it is now powering 8 million cars on the road and expects 30 million more cars in the near future to be powered by its Teg- ra platform, but more on that later. Today's automotive electronics or automo- tive embedded systems are mostly distributed systems, and they can be classified (in no spe- cific order) thusly: 1. Active safety 2. Transmission electronics 3. Chassis electronics 4. Driver assistance 5. Engine electronics 6. Passenger comfort 7. Entertainment systems Some of these have been around for a while, but you can soon add to the list sys- tems to manage autonomous vehicles—and that is not even the far future, but right around the next curve on the freeway. It's much closer than we may have imagined. Let's think about the au- tonomous or self-driving ve- hicle of the near future. What are some justifications? AuTOMOTIVE TECHNOLOGy continues FEAturE