AEye’s iDAR leverages Infineon AURIX as host for communication with AUTOSAR, functional safety and embedded software

AEye announced it has integrated Infineon’s AURIX TC35xx microcontroller into AEye’s iDAR platform to ensure a robust, software-definable platform that is functionally safe for automated and autonomous vehicle initiatives

iDAR (Intelligent Detection and Ranging) is a groundbreaking 2D/3D in-sensor perception system, which combines software extensibility, artificial intelligence and smart, agile sensors to deliver better information faster to self-driving vehicles. AURIX is a 32-bit Infineon microcontroller designed to deliver performance and safety to the automotive industry.

AURIX acts as a bridge between AEye’s embedded and perception software. For any software-defined configuration within AEye’s iDAR platform, AURIX is responsible for performance monitoring, time synchronization and other embedded software functions, ultimately standardizing communication on AUTOSAR to AEye’s perception platform, other OEM or automotive perception software developers.

iDAR is designed to run within the sensor for autonomous vehicles. It enables basic perception to be distributed to the edge of the sensor network, so autonomous designers can use sensors to not only search and detect objects, but also to acquire, and ultimately to classify and track these objects. The ability to collect this information in real-time both enables and enhances existing centralized perception software platforms by reducing latency, lowering costs and ensuring functional safety.

Infineon’s AURIX multicore architecture, based on up to six independent 32-bit TriCore CPUs, has been developed according to an audited ISO26262 compliant process and designed to meet ASIL-D on an application level. The platform uses a lockstep CPU architecture combined with safety technology such as safe internal communication buses or distributed memory protection systems. Hardware level encapsulation techniques allow integration of software with various safety levels (QM to ASIL-D) from different sources, reducing the system complexity of implementing those safety levels.