Renesas and LUPA partner to advance automotive smart-camera development

Renesas Electronics Corporation, a supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, and LUPA-Electronics GmbH, an automotive safety solution provider, has announced the EagleCAM module. This module is an open, front-camera solution, featuring Renesas’ R-Car V3H and R-Car V3M system-on-chip (SoC) devices.

The all-in-one scalable camera platform targets the latest Euro NCAP and C-NCAP requirements, such as automatic emergency braking, forward collision warning, lane-keeping assist, and traffic sign recognition. The jointly developed solutions enable OEMs and Tier 1s to differentiate and extend their offering by integrating their proprietary or third-party software that adds additional driving features.

“The combination of LUPA’s EagleCAM and Renesas R-Car SoCs delivers scalable and functional safety-compliant, open ADAS solutions that enable flexible feature integration, allowing customers to achieve quicker time to production,” said Naoki Yoshida, VP, Automotive Digital Products Marketing Division, Automotive Solution Business Unit, at Renesas. “We are excited that our collaboration will make it easier for our joint customers to develop smart-camera applications and bring NCAP and L2+ functionality to their vehicles more quickly and confidently.”

Most smart-camera turnkey solutions on the market today take a black-box solution approach, making it challenging for OEMs and Tier 1s to address changing market demands and slowing down development. With EagleCAM featuring R-Car SoCs, Renesas and LUPA introduce an open turnkey solution that delivers flexible, high-performance perception while shortening time to market and reducing the bill of materials (BOM) costs.

“The demand for automotive safety solutions is at an all-time high,” said Benjamin May, CEO at LUPA-Electronics. “We’re excited to publicly announce our partnership with Renesas. By integrating the low-power, high-performance R-Car SoCs into our EagleCAM smart-camera platform, we are making it easy for OEMs to add novel safety and driver comfort features to their next-generation vehicles. Our flexible approach speeds up product development cycles while enabling a safer, more fun driving experience for end customers.”

Based on Renesas’ proven R-Car SoCs, EagleCAM supports low to high-end front camera applications with extensions for surround view, driver monitoring, and augmented reality. In addition to the R-Car SoCs, EagleCAM also includes Renesas’ automotive power management ICs (PMICs) to further reduce BOM costs.

With the recent update of the R-Car V3H, the new turnkey solutions benefit from the improved CNN performance of up to 3.7 TOPS, ASIL-C capability of the real-time domain, and camera support of up to eight megapixels. EagleCAM features a pre-validated hardware design, shortening the time required to reach mass production. Customers can access best-in-class perception stacks that offer shorter turnaround times or stacks based on emerging technologies, allowing them to achieve the best fit for their application needs.