AI driven Automated Driving brings ZF and Xilinx together

Xilinx to collaborate with ZF Friedrichshafen AG for ZF ProAI, an artificial intelligence (AI) based automotive control unit, to enable automated driving applications. The announcement was made at recent CES 2019 event.

ZF Friedrichshafen AG is in the business of driveline and chassis technology as well as active and passive safety technology. Xilinx is an inventor of the FPGA, hardware programmable SoCs and the ACAP. Xilinx also develops highly flexible, adaptive processing platforms and one of the leaders in adaptive and intelligent computing

ZF selected Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC platform due to platform's ability to scale its the processing power and flexibility. Both of these factors are essential for ZF ProAI platform customized to serve individual customer requirements. The Xilinx platform handles real-time data aggregation, pre-processing, and distribution along with compute acceleration for the AI processing in ZF's new AI-based electronic control unit.

Executive Opinion

Head of ZF Advanced Engineering and general manager of Zukunft Ventures GmbH, Torsten Gollewski, said, "The unique selling proposition of the ZF ProAI is its modular hardware concept and open software architecture. Our aim is to provide the widest possible range of functions in the field of autonomous driving.

Vice president, core vertical markets, Xilinx, Yousef Khalilollahi, said, "We are proud to partner with ZF on its ProAI platform and help solve the challenges associated with autonomous vehicle development. By providing an adaptable hardware platform, ZF can design flexible and scalable systems that seamlessly incorporate AI compute acceleration and functional safety (FuSa) through diversity in processing engines. We look forward to expanding our collaboration with ZF to take autonomous and AI innovation to the next level."


Over 160 million Xilinx devices are in automotive systems today, and approximately 55 million of these are used for Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) alone. The announcement further said that ZF ProAI's approach is unique compared to other systems on the market, which use a fixed combination of hardware and software architecture – a solution that can potentially limit functionality and add more cost.