Renesas Electronics Corporation and Fixstars Corporation announced the joint development of a suite of tools that allows optimization and fast simulation of software for autonomous driving (AD) systems and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) specifically designed for the R-Car system-on-chip (SoC) devices from Renesas. These tools make it possible to rapidly develop network models with highly accurate object recognition from the initial stage of software development that take advantage of the performance of the R-Car. This reduces post-development rework and thereby helps shorten development cycles.

AD and ADAS applications use deep learning to achieve highly accurate object recognition. Deep learning inference processing requires massive amounts of data calculations and memory capacity. The models and executable programs on automotive applications must be optimized for an automotive SoC, since real-time processing with limited arithmetic units and memory resources can be a challenging task.

In addition, the process from software evaluation to verification must be accelerated and updates need to be applied repeatedly to improve the accuracy and performance. Renesas and Fixstars have developed the following tools designed to meet these needs.