At this year’s Auto Shanghai, Axera and Black Sesame Technologies showcased advancements that reflect two major automotive technology trends: expanding compute power and deeper system integration.
Axera presented its M57 series, the latest addition to its automotive chip portfolio, while Black Sesame revealed the Huashan A2000 family and a new smart safety platform built on its Wudang series. These products are designed to meet the growing need among automakers for centralized, high-performance computing systems.
The M57 series represents a substantial upgrade from Axera’s previous generation, offering up to 10 TOPS (tera operations per second) of compute capacity. It supports mixed-precision formats, FP8 and FP16, and is optimized for bird’s eye view (BEV) algorithms—critical for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving technologies.
Designed for energy efficiency and thermal stability, the M57 keeps power consumption below 3.5 watts even at a junction temperature of 125 degrees Celsius. This low power draw makes it a practical solution for both traditional internal combustion engine vehicles and electric vehicles.
To further enhance system performance, the M57 integrates Axera’s SmartVision AI-ISP technology, improving image quality under extreme lighting conditions and thereby supporting more accurate perception and decision-making in ADAS applications.
In terms of safety, the M57 incorporates a microcontroller unit (MCU) with an embedded safety island, allowing it to meet ASIL-B and ASIL-D requirements. This structure helps localize faults and limits their propagation across vehicle systems.
Axera has leveraged its mass production experience to make the M57 series readily deployable. The chip supports configurations ranging from advanced 5R5V domain control systems, which integrate driving and parking functions, to more cost-efficient solutions using two-megapixel cameras. Vehicles featuring the M57 are under development for the European market.
Black Sesame introduced its Huashan A2000 family, fabricated using a seven-nanometer automotive-grade process. The company shared that the A2000 series offers compute performance up to four times that of current automotive chips. The product line includes the A2000 Lite for assistance in urban scenarios, the A2000 for broader scenarios, and the A2000 Pro for high-level, full-scenario support.
To maximize computational efficiency, Black Sesame developed the Jiushao NPU architecture. This design accelerates transformer-based AI models for real-time inference and supports mixed-precision FP8 and FP16 computations. It also includes a priority preemption mechanism, ensuring that time-sensitive tasks receive computational resources when needed—a critical factor for high-level driver assistance systems.
In addition to Huashan, Black Sesame introduced its Wudang series, described as the industry’s first cross-domain fusion computing chips. The accompanying smart safety platform isolates smart cockpit, driver assistance, and body control functions, minimizing the risk of system-wide failures due to localized faults.
The modular design of the Wudang platform enables scalability via multi-chip parallelism, allowing automakers to adapt computing capacity to a wide range of vehicle classes while managing platform development costs more effectively.
Among the new offerings, Black Sesame showcased the Wudang C1296 chip, also manufactured using a seven-nanometer process. The C1296 integrates smart cockpit, driver assistance, and body control functions at the hardware level, facilitating real-time communication across critical subsystems. Several Dongfeng Motor Corporation models are already set to incorporate the C1296, with mass production planned for 2025.
KrASIA Connection features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Fan Shuqi for 36Kr.