Waymo unveils custom chip for self-driving system

Waymo, a division of Alphabet Inc., has unveiled details about the custom chip powering its autonomous driving system. The Alphabet company operates approximately 4,000 autonomous taxis in 11 U.S. cities, with most vehicles based on the Jaguar I-Pace, with the remainder being Zeeker minivans and Hyundai Ioniq 5 SUVs. Customers request rides through a dedicated app and via Uber.

Waymo's autonomous driving module is currently on its sixth generation, built around two custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). These accelerators can perform more than 1,000 trillion calculations per second. Waymo's ASICs, manufactured using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.'s five-nanometer node, are optimized for ultra-low latency and ultra-reliability.

The company uses two of these chips in the autonomous driving module to handle hardware failures, with the second chip taking over if the first one fails. The ASICs process data from a sensor suite consisting of 13 cameras, four lidar devices, and six radars. Cameras excel at capturing fine details, while lidars work better in low-light conditions.

The ASICs are designed for artificial intelligence inference, running models optimized for sensor fusion and error correction. The company's sensor fusion models verify frames for noise by checking adjacent frames (temporal denoising). The autonomous driving modules also include central processing units and graphics processing units, housed in a ruggedized enclosure that can withstand challenging conditions and extreme temperatures.