aiWare

aiWare™

Hardware IP for Automotive AI

Neural Network Acceleration for Automotive AI

The latest aiWare5 offers the flexibility needed to support a wide range of AI workloads—including SSMs, VTs, and LLMs—and offers industry-leading tools that transform how AI-enabled ADAS software is developed and validated.

Industry-First tools

Meet the aiWare emulator: bit-accurate and faster-than-real-time, a combination no other NPU emulator can match. It supercharges AI-enabled ADAS CI/CD pipelines, making them faster, simpler, and more efficient than ever.

Scalable solution

Scales from cost-sensitive L2/regulatory applications to multi-sensor L4 systems

Safety-first

The aiWare hardware has achieved ISO 26262 ASIL B certification. To download the safety certificate, click here

Production-proven hardware IP

Implemented in products like Nextchip’s APACHE series and Socionext’s chiplets, backed by a growing ecosystem of active aiWare users.

Highly deterministic solution​

Hardware determinism helps with certification for production safety environments; also enables offline high-accuracy performance estimation within 5% of final silicon months before chips available.

Easy integration

Designed for ease of layout, simple software interfacing, and advanced tools for system integration and validation.

Up to 1024 TOPS; up to 98% efficiency

High efficiency and patented data flow ensure 2x to 5x higher performance for the same claimed TOPS for a wide range of workloads, minimizing system power consumption. Up to 2GHz operation in 5nm over full AEC-Q100 Grade 2 operation.

Tools & Solutions

Unique SDK from system prototyping to production optimization

aiWare Studio tools are widely acclaimed by OEMs and Tier1s, thanks to a unique approach focused on optimization of NNs by AI engineers. No need for low-level software engineers hand-optimizing NPU code – that’s all done by our advanced offline compiler.

Automotive Grade

Powering the most demanding L2-L4 AD applications

Designed from the ground up to be integrated into ASIL-B and higher certified solutions covering a broad range of automotive use cases. From ultra-small edge sensor enhancement up to high-performance central processors, aiWare is the ideal solution for L2 to L4 automotive applications with the most demanding performance requirements.

Features & benefits

Our products are designed to accelerate the realization of your automated driving goals. Click the button below to download our latest aiWare benchmark document and scroll down to see what we can bring to the table.

High-performance, versatility and scalability

The aiWare hardware IP Core delivers high performance at low power, thanks to its class-leading highly optimized hardware architecture. With up to 256 sparse TOPS per core, aiWare5 is highly scalable for use in applications ranging from sensor edge processors and domain/zone controllers to high-performance centralized processing. While the core focus remains on ADAS perception workloads, the versatile hardware architecture also enables other applications, such as driver and occupant monitoring (DMS/OMS), language models, sensor tuning, and more.

Unique SDK plus optimized aiDrive-based AI

The aiWare Studio SDK has been recognized and acclaimed by OEMs and Tier1s around the world for its innovative approach to embedded NN optimization, focusing on iterating the NN itself, not just the NPU code used to execute it. This gives NN designers far more flexibility when implementing their NNs for production hardware platforms than other NPU solutions. The offline performance estimator within aiWare Studio is another highlight, delivering accurate performance estimation within 5% of final silicon on any desktop PC. And thanks to the comprehensive portfolio of aiDrive modular software for automotive AI, a wide range of software solutions fully optimized for aiWare are also available.

Powering the most demanding L2-L4 automated driving applications

As showcased by aiDrive deployed on aiWare enabled silicon, aiWare delivers the exact features needed for production automotive deployment, not just claiming high theoretical benchmark results in the lab. The underlying technology for aiWare has been engineered from the ground up for automotive production deployment. This ensures that aiWare customers can be confident that the silicon budget is extremely well utilized, providing support for features typically not benchmarked but required by ADAS neural networks—such as multi-input, multi-headed network support, robust functional safety, minimal inference-time jitter, and SIL testing capability. This is the main benefit of sourcing an NPU from an ADAS expert engineering team.

aiWare™ specification

aiWare is a state-of-the-art NPU for automotive inference, with many features built-in to maximize performance for a wide range of automotive AI applications.

Scalable performance

The aiWare5 RTL is fully synthesizable to deliver up to 256 TOPS per core @ 2GHz at 5nm, using standard libraries and memory compilers. The RTL is designed for easy integration, with no large buses and tiled computation modules to enable easy implementation at high clock speeds.

De-risking and accelerating the path to production

A GPU-accelerated, bit-accurate emulator enables faster-than-real-time SIL testing without target hardware, removing a major development bottleneck. Instead of sourcing hundreds of units and building costly labs, aiWare chips let teams use existing cloud or on-prem GPUs to run full stacks—delivering faster test cycles, lower costs, and virtually unlimited scalability.

Offering the right level of versatility

Built for state-of-the-art multi-input, multi-headed neural networks uniquely found in automotive perception NN-s. With its versatile engine, no matter if the backbone is a VT (Vision Transformer), a SSM (State Space Model) or a CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) based architecture, aiWare will handle it with ease. Looking beyond perception? With the right configuration, aiWare can handle LLM-s (Large Language Models) too!

Go to aiWare technical specifications