i.MX 93 Family Drives Advances in Assisted Safety, Cost-Optimized Gateway and AI-Based Applications

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 1.3 million people  die each year as a result of road traffic accidents. Around eight percent of these fatal crashes are caused by distracted driving. Distractions range from visual to manual to cognitive impairment, and cell phone usage and texting are prime culprits.

Compounding these tragic deaths, on average, one child dies every 10 days  from heatstroke in vehicles. In more than half of these deaths, the caregiver forgot the child was in the car, and the car’s interior can heat up nineteen degrees in just 10 minutes.

Our vehicles and roadways are marvels of technology, bringing immeasurable convenience and mobility to our lives. Yet, to achieve the goals of Vision Zero— a strategy to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries — we need advanced technology to improve the safety of our vehicles and roadways.

NXP has developed a series of i.MX applications processors designed to mitigate traffic accidents, avert distracted driving and help prevent driver errors through products that enable applications such as driver monitoring and occupant monitoring systems. Ultimately, NXP aims to help prevent road traffic accidents and protect drivers, passengers and other vulnerable road users, including pedestrians and bicyclists.

Presenting the i.MX 93 Family: First in the NXP Next-Gen i.MX 9 Series

The i.MX 93 family is the first of NXP’s next-generation i.MX 9 series applications processors. The i.MX 93 family will be qualified to meet the AEC-Q100 (grade 3) automotive standard and is planned to be in production by mid-2024. The i.MX 93 SoC integrates up to two Arm^® Cortex^®-A55 cores, one Arm Cortex-M33 core and one Arm^® Ethos^™ U65 neural processing unit (NPU). Automotive developers can bundle the i.MX 93 processor with NXP’s highly integrated PCA9452 power management integrated circuit (PMIC) and AW611 Wi-Fi^® module to address both the connectivity and power management needs of automotive applications.

Working in parallel with its heterogeneous cores and Arm^® Ethos^®-U65 NPU, i.MX 93 processors are suitable for various AI-based, compute-intensive automotive applications such as driver and in-cabin monitoring systems, including driver identification, fatigue detection, distraction detection, dangerous driving detection, speech recognition and natural language processing. The NPU offers at least a 10x boost to i.MX 93 processing capabilities in these scenarios. The dedicated NPU hardware capability and the NXP eIQ^® machine learning software development environment simplify the development of complete, system-level AI applications. Such AI-powered object recognition can help gather valuable data in the car and then send to the cloud for processing for various applications.

Multiple Gigabit Ethernet interfaces are capable of simultaneous operation, making i.MX 93 processors good candidates for automotive applications in cost-optimized gateways. Automotive gateways can be used to perform the following tasks:

• Receive real-time vehicle information
• Locate the nearest recharge stations and public parking spaces
• Provide efficient and flexible over-the-air (OTA) updates and alerts from auto manufacturers or rental companies
• Lock and unlock vehicles remotely
• Track and recover stolen vehicles, stream the car camera feed as well as theft or accident recording and process emergency calls for assistance

With its high-performance, power-efficient cores, highly integrated and optimized BOM, feature-rich human-machine interface (HMI) and connectivity options, the i.MX 93 SoC is well-suited for cost-effective general-purpose compute applications. Some of these key features make it a perfect add-on for existing architectures, and it can be combined with NXP MCUs for various automotive use cases.

NXP values functional safety as a core competency, especially for the automotive market. To that end, the i.MX 93 applications processors are quality-managed (QM) devices, offering the ability to support ASIL-B solutions using additional hardware. Subsequent products in the i.MX 9 series, such as the i.MX 95 family, will also be ASIL-B compliant.

Comprehensive Enablement for i.MX 93 Applications Development

i.MX 93 processors fully support embedded Linux^®, FreeRTOS, GHS, QNX and AutoSAR operating systems (OS). An optimized OS and a system-validated board support package (BSP) provide the tools to test and maximize the performance of customer applications quickly. The free-of-charge, tested and certified i.MX 93xx Linux BSP supports the Linux OS on i.MX 93xx SoCs and provides the interface to the standard open-source Linux kernel for the i.MX 93 processor hardware.

Partners like Green Hills and QNX also offer production-focused enablement for i.MX 93 SoC-based on safe and secure foundational software, including safety-certified RTOS, virtualization services and C/C++ development tools. Carmakers and Tier 1 suppliers can realize competitive advantages on their production vehicle programs by leveraging the combination of the i.MX 93 processor’s AI and enhanced performance features, along with Green Hills and QNX Software.

The highly integrated i.MX 93 SoC can help open many new use cases using its machine learning accelerators, higher performance cores and the capabilities offered by the safe and secure RTOS software and tools from Green Hills and QNX. With optional virtualization, customers can safely run real-time critical applications alongside Linux while achieving significant increases in developer productivity and shorter production time. Preliminary Green Hills and QNX product versions are available today for early customers on the i.MX 93-based EVK board and production versions will be available next year.

As a premium partner of the AUTOSAR standard, the NXP professional services team will offer production-intent microcontroller abstraction layer (MCAL) and OS software for i.MX 93 SoCs to help customers fast-track their development efforts.

Test Drive the i.MX 93 Processor in Your Next Automotive Design

Automotive-grade pre-production samples of i.MX 93 applications processors are available now. Dedicated evaluation kits are also available now to accelerate automotive customer development, along with easy-to-use development tools and a comprehensive partner ecosystem. Full commercial availability of i.MX 93 automotive grade processors is planned for mid-2024. To request early customer samples, contact Beta.iMX@nxp.com.