Hi Space Cadet,
I’m pretty sure one of our BOD said some time ago that safety certification is handled by the OEM.
From what I’ve read, it works something like this - the OEM (Mercedes in this case), owns the vehicle-level L3/L4 feature and the full ISO 26262 / SOTIF (ISO 21448) / ISO/SAE 21434 safety case. In short, Mercedes are the certifying party.
Mercedes can shift portions of the responsibility to a supplier (i.e Athos) if they ship the mSoC/ECU. In that case, Athos would be responsible for the ECU-level safety case (redundancy, voting, diagnostics) and for providing SEooC documentation back to Mercedes.
BrainChip’s role is different. We provide the IP plus the safety collateral (safety manual, failure-mode/diagnostics data, etc.) so our tech can be used inside the OEM’s vehicle/system-level certification.
From what I understand, for system certification you need the whole kit and caboodle - sensors + perception + planning + actuation + ISO 26262/SOTIF + redundancy. By that standard, no single accelerator (GPU/NPU/CPU/neuromorphic) “achieves L3/L4” on its own. Akida isn’t meant to be the whole ADAS computer; it’s a low-power, event-driven component that fits inside an L3/L4 ECU.
Athos Silicon’s mSoC is meant to give an OEM the building blocks to construct that ISO 26262/SOTIF case around their autonomous driving stack. Their pitch is that their solution is a safety envelope (redundancy + voting + diagnostics + isolation + timing discipline) that makes it easier for OEMs to build an L3/L4 system. It provides the critical safety architecture into which the rest of the stack can be integrated. That envelope is meant to be vendor-agnostic and therefore I suppose it can host NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Arm NPUs, Intel, BrainChip's Akida, etc.
I assume Piednoel said "Akida does not pass minimum requirements for a Level 3 or level 4" to promote his Athos’s mSoC solution, rather than provide free airtime to Akida. The idea being that chips don’t meet L3/L4 alone, but can inside Athos’s safety architecture.
Markus May’s “not on its own” reply reinforces that idea IMO.
These are my opinions only. Please DYOR.
