ARM Cortex-R52 Meets Highest Functional Safety Standards
Providing powerful real-time performance required for next-generation autonomous driving systems

ARM announced the release of a new real-time processor with enhanced safety features for autonomous vehicles, medical, and industrial robots.

The ARM Cortex-R52 is designed to address functional safety in systems that must comply with ISO 26262 ASIL D and IEC 61508 SIL 3, the strictest safety standards in the automotive and industrial industries.

The Cortex-R52 is ideal for systems that require advanced safety features while running with efficient and fast response speeds. This enables a wide range of applications, such as surgical automation, safety management, and automotive drivetrain control. STMicroelectronics announced that it is the first ARM partner to license the Cortex-R52 processor to develop highly integrated automotive SoCs.

James McNiven, Head of ARM’s CPU and Media Group, stated, “The Cortex-R52, the first processor based on the ARMv8-R architecture, is designed for thorough functional stability,” adding, “ARM helps partners capture market opportunities in fields such as autonomous vehicles and robotic systems where specific functions are required for safety-critical tasks.” ARM stated, “By supporting rigorous development process documentation, fault modeling, and software isolation features, ARM helps partners working with these applications enter market faster.”

Streamlining safety certification procedures for automotive, industrial, and medical applications

The Cortex-R52 ensures that safety-critical code is completely isolated through the hardware separation of software tasks. As a result, the hardware is managed by a software hypervisor that controls task execution and resources.

Through precise and robust software isolation, the Cortex-R52 reduces the amount of code requiring safety certification, thereby simplifying software integration, maintenance, and verification processes and accelerating development. It addresses increased software complexity by providing the determinism and fast context switching capabilities required by real-time systems.

With the announcement of ARM Fast Models and Cycle Models, software partners are now able to develop solutions for the processor. Market entry is further accelerated because it allows software developers to access the Cortex-R52 at the early stages of the design process.

The Cortex-R52 provides 35% improved performance compared to the Cortex-R5, which has already been adopted in various safety applications. In the EEMBC AutoBench test using Green Hills Compiler 2017, it achieved the highest Automark™/MHz among processors in its class at 1.36.