South Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) has developed a nine-core high-performance processor controlling a self-driving car, a move that is expected to reduce Korean autonomous car developers’ reliance on import processors.

ETRI announced on Tuesday that it succeeded in developing a nine-core processor that will act as a brain of a self-driving car. The new autonomous car processor, dubbed Aldebaran, is an upgraded version of the quad-core processor that ETRI introduced last year.

The chip with a dimension of 7.8 x 6.7 millimeters allows a self-driving car to detect movement of people and other cars on the street and process images while consuming only around 1 watt of electricity. Also, with 9 million calculations per second, the chip can process data faster and generate clearer images than its predecessor.

Aldebaran is expected to bring a big change to local self-driving tech industry that has mainly relied on foreign country-made processors. The latest upgrades that ensure simultaneous processing of ultra high definition images and motion identification, as well as a 99 percent rate of auto detection of breakdowns in the system are expected to accelerate the development of indigenous self-driving car processors, industry observers said.

The government-funded research institute aims to commercialize the upgraded processor through a local semiconductor designing company by next year. It already transferred the quad-core processor technology to NextChip for commercialization.

ETRI plans to continue upgrading the processor to the level that enables self-driving cars to recognize all moving objects without human assistance as well as developing a chip that can make a machine select destination and search routes on its own, said Kwon Young-soo, a researcher at ETRI.

By Kim Yoon-jin

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