Modern and future AI-based automotive applications, such as autonomous driving, require the efficient real-time processing of huge amounts of data from different sensors, like camera, radar, and LiDAR. In the ZuSE-KI-AVF project, multiple university, and industry partners collaborate to develop a novel massive parallel processor architecture, based on a cus-tomized RISC-V host processor, and an efficient high-performance vertical vector coprocessor. In addition, a software development framework is also provided to efficiently program AI-based sensor processing applications. The proposed processor system was verified and evaluated on a state-of-the-art UltraScale+ FPGA board, reaching a processing performance of up to 126.9 FPS, while executing the YOLO-LITE CNN on 224x224 input images. Further optimizations of the FPGA design and the realization of the processor system on a 22nm FDSOI CMOS technology are planned.

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in space applications come with the drawback of radiation effects, which inevitably will occur in devices of small process size. This also applies to the electronics of the Bose Einstein Condensate and Cold Atom Laboratory (BECCAL) apparatus, which is planned to operate on the International Space Station for several years. A total of more than 100 FPGAs distributed in the setup will be used for high-precision control of specialized sensors and actuators at nanosecond scale. Due to the large amount of devices in BECCAL, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) FPGAs are used which are not radiation hardened. In this work, we detect and mitigate radiation effects in an application specific COTS-FPGA-based communication network. For that redundancy is integrated into the design while the firmware is optimized to stay within the FPGA's resource constraints. A redundant integrity checker module is developed which can notify preceding network devices about data and configuration bit errors. The firmware is evaluated by injecting faults into data and configuration registers in simulation and real hardware. The FPGA resource usage of the firmware is cut down by more than half, enabling the use of double modular redundancy for the switching fabric. Together with the triple modular redundancy protected integrity checker, this combination fully prevents silent data corruptions in the design as shown in simulations and by injecting faults in hardware using the Intel Fault Injection FPGA IP Core while staying in the resource limitation of a COTS FPGA.