As usual, this year Ambarella had a number of interesting announcements and demos to show off. At a high level, the important announcements for this year are the H3 8K UHD video chip, H22 4K UHD drone/action camera chip, and the A9AQ automotive video chip with B6 serializer/deserializer companion chip that are AEC-Q100 qualified for automotive use. For those that don’t follow Ambarella too closely, the H3 SoC is the successor to the H2 SoC, going from 4K120 capture to 8K30 capture or dual 4K60 capture for things like 360 cameras and includes things like a quad core A53 for computer vision and other compute tasks to avoid a separate chip. EIS is now supported up to 4K60. Like the H2, 10-bit HDR is also available to improve performance.
For drones and similar devices that don’t require as much capability in the ISP department, the H22 SoC enables up to 4K60 in HEVC and EIS for 4K video, likely limited to 4K30. Like the H3, it also has a quad core A53 cluster with NEON for compute and similar tasks. For drone applications, it also supports the ability to provide a low latency 1080p output for things like drone racing applications.
The A9AQ SoC is specifically targeted at automotive applications and allows for three cameras to run off of a single chip which allows for digital rear and side view mirrors in a car and has features like HDR to provide better visibility in low light and high contrast, in addition to LED flicker mitigation to avoid flicker effects from LED streetlights and headlights. This chip also has the ability to stitch together various video feeds to provide a surround view with the cameras. To reduce cost, deserialization has been integrated into the A9AQ and the B6 allows for the parallel output of a camera up to 4K30 to be serialized for simplified implementation.
