AMD Supplies Chips to Aisin Corp for Autonomous Parking Technology

AMD's top management. (photo: twitter @lisaSu)

JAKARTA - Chip design company from the United States, Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) on Wednesday, November 16, said that Japan's major automotive supply company, Aisin Corp, has selected AMD microprocessors to run a new system that can help cars park themselves or autonomously .

“This parking system has become a foothold in today's ultra-luxury vehicle market. Aisin's solution is designed to make this more commonplace, as the solution itself is designed to fit the module very cost-effectively," said Wayne Lyons, AMD's senior director for the automotive market.

The chip is called Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC and is being developed by Xilinx, which was acquired by AMD this year. Xilinx specializes in chips called FPGAs, or field programmable gate arrays. Their circuits can be reconfigured once the chips are installed in things like cars.

"These chips will enable automakers to update not only software, but chips as well, after the car is sold," Rehan Tahir, AMD's senior product marketing manager for automotive, told Reuters.

Tahir said the Aisin automatic parking system would start production in the 2024 model year, but declined to say which car brands would use it.

Aisin is a member of the Toyota Group company, Toyota Motor Corp. which introduced one of the first parking assist systems in Japan in the early 2000s. The system, which guides the vehicle to a parking space, was offered in 2006 in the United States on the high-end Lexus LS sedan, and is now marketed on various Toyota and Lexus models, including the Prius.

Tahir said Aisin's system works with four cameras and 12 ultrasonic sensors on the car to parallel park and also return to the parking lot. “But the human in the car has to decide whether the place is in a no-parking zone or not,” said Tahir.