Insider Brief
- NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Foxconn CEO Young Liu have announced an extended collaboration to develop intelligent EV platforms, featuring NVIDIA’s DRIVE solutions like DRIVE Orin and its successor, DRIVE Thor.
- Foxconn will manufacture AI-rich EVs using the upcoming NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion 9 platform, which integrates DRIVE Thor and a state-of-the-art sensor architecture.
- This platform is designed for advanced automated and autonomous driving scenarios.
PRESS RELEASE —October 17, 2023 — NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang joined Hon Hai (Foxconn) Chairman and CEO Young Liu to unveil the latest in their ongoing partnership to develop the next wave of intelligent electric vehicle (EV) platforms for the global automotive market.
This latest move, announced today at the fourth annual Hon Hai Tech Day in Taiwan, will help Foxconn realize its EV vision with a range of NVIDIA DRIVE solutions — including NVIDIA DRIVE Orin today and its successor, DRIVE Thor, down the road.
In addition, Foxconn will be a contract manufacturer of highly automated and autonomous, AI-rich EVs featuring the upcoming NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion 9 platform, which includes DRIVE Thor and a state-of-the-art sensor architecture.
Next-Gen EVs With Extraordinary Performance
The computational requirements for highly automated and fully self-driving vehicles are enormous. NVIDIA offers the most advanced, highest-performing AI car computers for the transportation industry, with DRIVE Orin selected for use by more than 25 global automakers.
Already a tier-one manufacturer of DRIVE Orin-powered electronic control units (ECUs), Foxconn will also manufacture ECUs featuring DRIVE Thor, once available.
The upcoming DRIVE Thor superchip harnesses advanced AI capabilities first deployed in NVIDIA Grace CPUs and Hopper and Ada Lovelace architecture-based GPUs — and is expected to deliver a staggering 2,000 teraflops of high-performance compute to enable functionally safe and secure intelligent driving.
Heightened Senses
Unveiled at GTC last year, DRIVE Hyperion 9 is the latest evolution of NVIDIA’s modular development platform and reference architecture for automated and autonomous vehicles. Set to be powered by DRIVE Thor, it will integrate a qualified sensor architecture for level 3 urban and level 4 highway driving scenarios.
With a diverse and redundant array of high-resolution camera, radar, lidar and ultrasonic sensors, DRIVE Hyperion can process an extraordinary amount of safety-critical data to enable vehicles to deftly navigate their surroundings.
Another advantage of DRIVE Hyperion is its compatibility across generations, as it retains the same compute form factor and NVIDIA DriveWorks application programming interfaces, enabling a seamless transition from DRIVE Orin to DRIVE Thor and beyond.
Plus, DRIVE Hyperion can help speed development times and lower costs for electronics manufacturers like Foxconn, since the sensors available on the platform have cleared NVIDIA’s rigorous qualification processes.
The shift to software-defined vehicles with a centralized electronic architecture will drive the need for high-performance, energy-efficient computing solutions such as DRIVE Thor. By coupling it with the DRIVE Hyperion sensor architecture, Foxconn and its automotive customers will be better equipped to realize a new era of safe and intelligent EVs.
Since its inception, Hon Hai Tech Day has served as a launch pad for Foxconn to showcase its latest endeavors in contract design and manufacturing services and new technologies. These accomplishments span the EV sector and extend to the broader consumer electronics industry.
Written by DANNY SHAPIRO
Featured image: Credit: NVIDIA
