NXP launches new automotive radar solution

Created through a partnership with Colorado Engineering, the solution is the only currently available automotive-grade radar development platform designed to meet the stringent functional, performance, and safety requirements of the industry. This new radar solution is designed to accelerate the development and deployment of radar into production vehicles and includes a full ecosystem of tools that aim to lower development costs and spur radar application adoption worldwide.

Current automotive market analysis projects that by 2020, radar technology will be in 50% of all newly produced cars. The safety related benefits of automotive radar, new autonomous vehicle development requirements and emerging safety requirements from organizations such as the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP), have triggered rapid growth with steep implementation challenges for car makers and other radar focused developers. Adoption of these once premium safety features into mainstream production lines is fueling a need for faster time to market

The NXP radar solution, featuring the S32R27 processor, the TEF810x CMOS transceiver, and the FS8410 Power management IC, is designed to help customers accelerate time to market by lowering the barriers of entry to radar application development with hardware, software and tools that ease radar implementations.

Built in collaboration with Colorado Engineering, the new RDK-S32R274 radar solution is targeted to help developers rapidly prototype high-performance automotive radar using NXP technology. The open and flexible development platform uses a modular architecture and includes a NXP S32R processor and a NXP transceiver along with an innovative radar software development kit. Expansion and antenna modules can be optimised to create a customised development platform suited to specific customer application requirements.

"NXP's market leading portfolio of radar processors and our end-to-end system development and integration expertise creates a unique solution that accelerates time-to-market for customers," said Dr. Larry Scally, CEO of Colorado Engineering Inc. "By leveraging the highly-optimised radar accelerators that are integrated in the S32R27, customers are well positioned to implement extremely complex automotive radar applications."

As a technology and a market leader in radar processing, NXP's highly integrated radar processors offer customers a scalable family of products including the previously announced S32R27 and S32R37. These devices offer 10x performance/watt improvement over a traditional DSP by integrating highly-efficient radar accelerators. This enables longer range, higher resolution and accuracy for safety critical applications such as collision avoidance, lane change assist, autonomous emergency braking.

The automotive grade Radar Software Development Kit provides customers an extensive radar algorithm library to quickly build and optimise applications without having to invest resources to hand tune accelerator software. NXP's extensive ecosystem of compilers, development environments, MCALS, and both free and commercial RTOS support provides customers the tools needed for faster development.