Arm is introducing its compute platform for the next era of automotive innovation, the AI-defined vehicle, through its Compute Subsystems (CSS) for Automotive, named Arm Zena CSS.
The first-generation Zena CSS is a standardized, pre-integrated and pre-validated compute platform based on the latest, proven Armv9 Automotive Enhanced (AE) technologies. It brings together verified, low power, high performance IP, a dedicated Safety Island and Runtime Security Engine, reference firmware, and software support into a complete CSS that is ready for silicon implementation. This comprehensive solution gives automakers the confidence to move faster, reduce costs and risk, and deliver more differentiated, intelligent vehicle experiences, from concept to production.
Suraj Gajendra, Vice President of Product and Solutions for the Automotive Line of Business at Arm, explained in a blog post how Zena CSS significantly reduces timelines for both hardware and software delivery. As the automotive industry transitions toward the AI-defined vehicle, where intelligence is distributed across domains and features and workloads are continuously updated over-the-air and executed at the edge, Zena CSS provides a unified foundation for scalable, safety-capable compute.
Each subsystem includes the following components and features:
- High-performance compute with a 16-core Arm Cortex-A720AE CPU cluster;
- CPU coherency and chip-to-chip IO connectivity provided by CMN S3AE;
- Safety Island with real-time processing using Arm Cortex-R82AE;
- Runtime Security Engine for secure over-the-air updates;
- System-wide security and root-of-trust enabled by Arm TrustZone;
- Verified Register Transfer Level (RTL) and reference firmware;
- Optional Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and Image Signal Processing (ISP) integration powered by Arm Mali-C720AE and Mali GPU; and
- Support for easy integration of accelerators and partner-specific logic to meet evolving workload demands for advanced, AI-capable SoC design.
Suraj explains how Zena CSS scales from IVI to central compute and Level 2+ Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), giving automakers the flexibility to deploy across multiple vehicle lines and performance tiers without reinventing the compute stack or starting from scratch on safety certification. Moreover, the pervasive Arm compute architecture means the automotive ecosystem can reuse and port many elements of their software, including firmware, middleware, operating systems and even applications, across differentiated Zena CSS-based SoCs from different vendors.
The blog goes on to discuss how Zena CSS can help to reduce the overall engineering burden, both upfront and over time. This is especially important to the automotive industry where timelines are tight and feature sets are continuously expanding. Zena CSS provides the following benefits to reduce costs and complexity during the development process:
- Up to 20% reduction in silicon engineering effort required versus traditional IP based designs, freeing up teams to focus on differentiating capabilities tailored to AI-defined vehicle workloads; and
- Up to 30% reduction in porting effort from platform to platform through software standardization, saving software development time and costs.
This leads to an overall lower total vehicle platform development cost, with the consistent Arm architecture providing the ability to scale across ADAS, central compute, and IVI use cases for both monolithic and chiplet-based silicon designs.
AI has become a fundamental capability across all domains of the modern vehicle. However, as these intelligent features evolve, they introduce new challenges. Zena CSS is being presented as a solution purpose-built for this transformation, offering scalable performance, commercial differentiation, streamlined integration, and software portability for the AI-defined vehicle era.
