Helping a car make the right decision is fundamental to autonomous driving. Israel-based Arbe Robotics develops chipsets enabling imaging radars to gather environment data in high fidelity, allowing an autonomous vehicle (AV) to drive safely. Its advanced solutions have won partnerships for the company in Asia, the US and Europe.
Founded in 2015 by a group of semiconductor engineers, radar specialists and data scientists, Arbe became a Nasdaq-listed company last October. It is set to begin mass production of its chips in 2023 with GlobalFoundries.
According to Kobi Marenko, Arbe's co-founder and CEO, automotive applications take up 90% of the company's businesses. Homeland security and warehouse robots account for the rest.
The CEO said a primary challenge for autonomous driving is to achieve free space mapping – the ability to map the environment in real-time from 360 degrees, regardless of the range.
He said a state-of-the-art imaging radar based on the Arbe chipset can generate free space mapping data with high fidelity in any weather and lighting condition and up to a very long range. With the information, an AV can make the right decision to change lanes or take other actions appropriately.
A solution enabling high-quality and fidelity data
Veoneer, a Swedish Tier-1 supplier, recently chose Arbe's chipset solution to support its long-range, high-resolution radar with 48×48 RF channels and a surround radar with 24×12 RF channels for 360-degree sensing.
Veoneer is one of the leading automotive radar system providers. According to a press release, its next-generation radars are expected to be in pre-production by mid-2023.
Marenko said the main advantage of Arbe's chipset lies in its ability to process 10 times more data than the next competitor. He added that high resolution is dictated by the number of transmitters and receivers in the radar sector, similar to the number of pixels for cameras. For example, the company's processing chip can enable an imaging radar to manage 48 transmitters and 48 receivers, generating 2304 "radar pixels", while the next competitor can only achieve less than 10% of that.
Marenko said it means Arbe offers significantly higher quality, fidelity and detail in a picture. In addition, the CEO said the company is today the only player in the market to generate free space mappings based merely on radars, largely because it holds a patent around a solution tackling Doppler ambiguity: simply put, Marenko said all Arbe's competitors face a problem: each moving target on the radar creates three other false marks in the environment. So these companies need to take post-processing measures to identify the real one.
Marenko said radars supported by Arbe's patent would not encounter the same issue, which reflects the quality of the point cloud that the company generates.
Growing presence in major Asian markets
The Israeli radar chips developer has gained a presence in Asia besides Europe. According to Marenko, Arbe has partnered with HiRain Technologies and Weifu High-Technology Group in China. Both are Tier-1 suppliers. He added that the two companies would reach mass production of Arbe's chipset by mid-2023.
According to a press release, HiRain was recently selected by the Port of RiZhao in Shandong Province to provide perception radars based on Arbe's chipset. The deployment supports FAW trucks and automated guided vehicles (AGVs) to provide autonomous driving capabilities.
Moreover, Marenko said Arbe works closely with the innovation center of Hyundai Motor, one of its investors. The duo finished a large-scale pilot project not long ago for the automaker's L2+ and L3 autonomous driving technology.
Supply constrain slows down automotive innovation
Autonomous driving is one of the automotive industry's cutting-edge technologies. However, Marenko said the market has moved slowly and decisions have been delayed or taken longer than expected because of supply chain disruptions resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The semiconductor shortage affects Arbe indirectly, although the issue has been mitigated. Marenko said carmakers were busy securing chips for basic functions such as opening the window or the screens in a vehicle last year instead of investing and focusing on innovation.
"This slowed down dramatically the ability of the industry to progress and to make decisions on next-generation platforms. By the end of the day, (this) also influenced our ability to get into production in cars," Marenko said.
But there is good news, too.
As cars become more software-driven, some automakers have established a software unit or subsidiary. Marenko said it helps a company like Arbe work with OEMs more efficiently and bring its technology to the market faster.
In the past, an OEM would select the hardware and then the software team started to work on it, according to Marenko. He said now software teams are already buying samples of the hardware and beginning to develop the software stack based on it prior to the selection of the hardware.
He added that the change reduces the time from selection to production. At the same time, it improves automakers' ability to work in the ever-changing environment of technologies.
