Shanghai, August 2021 – Horizon Robotics, a leader in automotive computing solutions for smart vehicles, unveiled its third-generation automotive-grade processor Journey 5, designed for Level-4 high autonomous driving. It also launched a real-time operating system TogetherOS, which will be fully open to partners along the automotive industry chain.
Journey 5 system-on-a-chip (SoC) came after two years of intensive R&D efforts. Its mass production is expected to start in 2022 following the announcement, at the event, of intended mass product cooperation with top automobile companies including SAIC Motor, Great Wall Motors, JAC Group, Changan Auto and BYD. The first group of partners that will join the TogetherOS ecosystem include SAIC Motor, Great Wall Motors, JAC Group, Changan Automobile, AutoCore, Lion Tech and Banma Network Technology
The products were launched at an event on July 29th in Shanghai, which was attended by hundreds of business partners and media. The launch reaffirmed Horizon as a provider of full-stack solutions, including processor, algorithm and toolchain, to empower intelligent vehicles. Such open-source approach also showcases Horizon’s dedication to become a facilitator and enabler in an open ecosystem for the development of intelligence cars.
Kai Yu, founder and chief executive officer of Horizon Robotics, said: “We are proud to become the industry’s first provider of processors that enable Level-2 to Level-4 autonomous driving. Horizon is committed to exploring the best human-car interaction experience in both autonomous driving and in-cabin smart system, which we believe is the future of intelligent vehicles. But we cannot do it alone. We open our operating system and toolchains to customers and partners so that they can design solutions catering to their needs and automatically upgrade their software based on our Journey processors.”
All of Horizon’s processors are designed to ensure safe and reliable driving experience, top performance, as well as competitive cost and energy efficiency. The company launched its first- and second-generation processors Journey 2 and Journey 3 in 2019 and 2020 respectively. It also achieved mass production of the two processors in 2020 and 2021 respectively. By the end of 2020, Horizon had delivered 160,000 Journey 2 processors.
Certified in July to have met ISO 26262 ASIL-B functional safety standards, Journey 5 SoC can handle numerous applications and deep neural networks simultaneously for various functions, including visualization of surrounding environments, infotainment and passenger interaction. It features up to 128 TOPS (Trillion Operations Per Second) processing capabilities for a single processor, among the most powerful in the world so far, supporting neural computing from 16 sensors.
Chang Huang, co-founder and chief technology officer, said: “Our goal is to achieve best performance-power-cost balance for our automotive computing solutions. With Journey 5, we move a step closer towards full autonomous driving.”
TogetherOS, Horizon’s newly launched real-time operating system, supports multiple operating systems including Linux and Android, and meets demands for all application scenarios including front assist, pilot assist, and smart in-cabin. It is built on seL4, one of the world’s most secure operating system kernel that is open sourced and freely available on GitHub.
Horizon is making TogetherOS software solution and its tool chains accessible to industry partners like car manufacturers and tier-1 suppliers to accelerate their R&D activities, in turn catalyzing the development and mass production of intelligent vehicles.
