The new radar SoCs: sharper vision for automated driving

Reliable, real-time object recognition is essential for safer and more scalable automated driving. From identifying pedestrians crossing the road to preventing rear-end collisions and detecting vehicles in blind spots – accurate radar SoCs (System-on-Chip) play a central role in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), thanks to their robustness in challenging conditions such as darkness, rain, or fog.

To further strengthen these safety-critical capabilities, Bosch has now introduced its new radar SoC solutions – the SX600 and SX601. These next-generation chips are designed to power a wide range of ADAS features aligned with SAE Level 2+ automation, including automatic emergency braking adaptive cruise control, blind spot detection, and lane change assist.

Radar SoC: precision meets performance

Both the SX600 and the SX601 feature a fast-reacting, fully digital phase-locked loop (PLL), which enables highly flexible chirp sequences and, as a result, exceptional resolution. The receiver architecture delivers a high dynamic range, ensuring optimized object recognition with strong sensitivity to small and distant targets. At the same time, error rates are significantly lower than with conventional radar sensors.

This advanced level of radar detection naturally requires greater computing power – a factor Bosch specifically addressed when developing the new radar SoCs. Manufactured using cutting-edge 22-nm RF-CMOS technology, both chips integrate a millimeter-wave sensor front end and a powerful digital signal processor for either conventional or AI-based data processing. The resulting radar systems achieve sensing ranges that exceed current market standards by around 30 percent. The integrated multicore subsystem offers sufficient memory for hosting customer-specific functions directly on-chip, while also leaving the headroom for future extensions.

AI-capability helps with complex traffic scenarios

The SX601 offers the highest computing power of all radar SoCs on the market, making it the ideal platform for AI-enhanced ADAS functions. Using neural networks, the chip can detect and classify a wide variety of objects in real time – and can differentiate between pedestrians, cyclists, vehicles, and static objects such as guardrails or parked cars. This intelligent classification is particularly valuable in dense urban environments. To support customers in implementing AI-based features, a dedicated toolchain optimized for machine learning applications is also available from Bosch.

Built for easy integration and future scalability

The SX600 and SX601 operate in the 77 GHz frequency band and are equipped with CAN XL and high speed Gbit Ethernet interfaces for flexible integration into various vehicle system architectures. Built-in hardware security modules and MACsec accelerators ensure protection against unauthorized access and data manipulation. Designed with scalability in mind, the two models share a common footprint and are fully drop-in compatible. This allows manufacturers to upgrade from the SX600 to the more powerful SX601 without any hardware redesign.

While the SX600 is tailored for cost-sensitive applications, the SX601 delivers significantly greater computing power and memory resources. Both chips feature four transmit and four IQ receive channels and can be cascaded for high-end use cases requiring extended performance. Drawing on 25 years of experience in radar semiconductor development, Bosch now supplies the SoCs directly to OEMs and distributors. Development samples of the SX601 are already available for global testing and validation.