Imagination is partnership with Japanese automotive component manufacturing company DENSO sophisticated automotive electronics systems.

DENSO, one of Japan'a best-known automotive component manufacturing companies, has been working to develop Electronic Control Units (ECUs) to support future automotive features. It focuses on producing Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), such as sensors that monitor that road, and communications systems that can provide vehicles with critical information on traffic volumes and road conditions.

Right now, the most advanced self-driving cars on the road offer Level 3 autonomy, which enables the driver to let the car drive itself, but only within known and relatively predictable environments such as motorways. To move beyond this to Level 4 and Level 5, where cars can drive themselves on B-roads and busy high streets, will require much more advanced vision and processing systems, with the adding complications of more unpredictable traffic patterns, pedestrians, more complex road signs and more variable lighting conditions.

All of this can be summed in one word - data, and this needs to be accumulated by the vehicle and then analysed as quickly and as efficiently as possible. For this to occur, the processing systems in cars will have to operate at ever greater speeds. And Imagination believes that its MIPS CPUs and PowerVR GPUs can make the difference.

For MIPS CPUs a key advantage is hardware multi-threading, where multiple threads or processes can be executed concurrently, increasing efficiency over non multi-threaded CPUs for highly parallel applications.

DENSO already has experience producing today's ADAS solutions, such as lane keeping, blind-spot detection and collision avoidance systems. To take things to the next level however, and achieve higher levels of autonomy and safety, there is a need to move away from the limitations imposed by the current Controller Area Network (CAN bus) architecture. The Japanese company will work with Imagination to engage in joint research on hardware multithreading. The companies? joint aim is to further enhance and optimise the use of hardware multi-threading through analysis and application testing.