Budapest, Hungary, March 24, 2021 – aiMotive, the largest independent team working on automated driving technologies in Europe, today announced it has integrated the Khronos® Group’s Vulkan® API to improve raytracing performance in aiSim 3.0.

The world’s first ISO26262 certified, automotive-grade open simulator tool for automated driving development, aiSim, is designed to accurately and efficiently simulate all major sensor modalities required for automated driving. The next generation of the simulator, aiSim 3.0 will launch in April 2021. 

aiSim can provide the highest coverage for various hardware platforms by utilizing the industry standard Vulkan API. Use of the recent Vulkan Ray Tracing extension improves simulation performance by efficiently distributing rendering tasks to available GPU ray tracing hardware. It also enables creation of the next level of physically realistic input for the sensors, including cameras, LiDAR, and radar through the correct simulation of lights, weather within a holistic environment.  

Thanks to efficient data sharing and streaming, aiSim enables real-time simulation for HIL (Hardware-in-the-Loop), even for the most complex sensor setups. 

“aiMotive is committed to open standards that allow our customers and the entire industry to use all suitable components at the lowest cost without compromising on performance. By using Vulkan Ray Tracing, aiSim can provide more realistic automotive simulation than ever in real time and accelerate the further development and testing of automated driving systems.” – said László Kishonti, CEO and Founder of aiMotive. 

“Vulkan provides explicit control over GPU acceleration so that sophisticated developers such as aiSim can unlock the full potential of underlying platforms for their customers that demand high performance and visual realism. As an open standard, Vulkan Ray Tracing has now unlocked a real-time rendering technology previously only available in expensive cinematic visual effects on low-cost workstations and personal computers from multiple manufacturers. The accuracy and physical correctness of ray tracing is particularly well suited to simulation environments, and we are pleased to see professional automotive applications using this new Vulkan capability alongside gaming.” – said Neil Trevett, Khronos President.

About aiMotive: aiMotive is one of the largest independent teams in the world working on automated driving technologies and the most-funded European company in the field. Developing self-driving software, proprietary simulation tools and neural network acceleration hardware IP, we are building an ecosystem that aids the deployment of automated driving. We create scalable, modular and hardware agnostic products to catalyse industry collaboration and bring life-saving technologies to drivers around the world quickly. Our team’s deep understanding of artificial intelligence, sensor fusion, and real-world automated driving workloads is further strengthened by data gathered from our global test fleet. Our many years’ experience in 3D graphics and optimization for a wide range of hardware platforms enables us to deliver the highest performance software solutions in automotive software as well as local and cloud-based scalable simulation. 

About The Khronos Group: The Khronos Group is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of over 150 industry-leading companies creating advanced, royalty-free, interoperability standards for 3D graphics, augmented and virtual reality, and parallel programming including the new-geneation Vulkan GPU API. Khronos members drive the development and evolution of Khronos specifications and are able to accelerate the delivery of cutting-edge platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. 

Khronos® and Vulkan® are registered trademarks of The Khronos Group Inc.