The Mapbox Virtual Head Unit will be available on Arm® Zena™ CSS announced today by Arm. OEM developers can sign up to request a preview of Mapbox on Arm Zena CSS. 

Arm Zena CSS is Arm’s compute subsystems (CSS) for automotive — a validated compute platform optimized for performance, power consumption, and area, designed to accelerate development for the AI-defined vehicle. Zena CSS pre-integrates core functions and is optimized for automotive applications, saving time for OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers by eliminating the pre-work of integrating separate SoCs to create a compute platform. 

Begin iterative development on
day 1

Arm Zena CSS, together with virtual prototyping from Arm ecosystem partners like Mapbox will enable developers to start building on the target architecture before the first hardware samples are available. Because virtual prototyping emulates the SoC down to the gate level on the chip, this high-precision virtual environment ensures that software built on the virtual platform will execute the same way in silicon. This lets engineers and designers kick off development and commit to design decisions well before hardware is available.

Moving up the stack

Developers can spin up a cloud-hosted or local virtual environment that emulates the target operating system complete with Mapbox SDKs and start building within an ecosystem that includes Cerence AI (another Mapbox partner), RedHat, Denso, Panasonic Automotive Systems, GitHub, and others.

Freedom to focus on core experiences

Building with Mapbox on Arm Zena CSS means that developers and designers can get started early and easily, without the burden of complex integrations. Starting development months earlier than previously possible will give teams more time to build the in-vehicle experiences that can define their brands.

Teams can focus on creating the user experiences they want and experiment freely without being bound by the availability of hardware. Hardware resources can be scaled up or down just as easily as Mapbox UIs can be scaled to different screen sizes and aspect ratios. For example, if design exploration calls for a pillar-to-pillar display spanning the dashboard, or multiple coordinated displays throughout the vehicle, teams can experiment freely with the confidence that what they build will run as intended on the target platform.

Furthermore, Arm’s compute platform facilitates pre-integration and collaboration among Arm partners, including Mapbox and our existing partners like Cerence AI for voice-driven navigation. The Arm ecosystem continues to simplify development, enabling OEMs to redirect engineering focus away from expensive integration, and toward building differentiated experiences.

“The AI-defined vehicle demands modern development approaches where software teams can fast-track the development of innovative in-vehicle experiences. By integrating Mapbox’s navigation solution into virtual platforms supporting Arm Zena CSS, automakers and their partners can optimize and deliver next-generation features with greater speed and confidence.” — Suraj Gajendra, Vice President of Automotive Products and Software Solutions, Automotive Line of Business, Arm

“Automotive software teams struggle to develop and test in-car solutions on next generation hardware. It takes months to produce and deliver test racks to suppliers causing delays in integration, and unexpected performance issues at the last minute. Mapbox Automotive SDKs on Arm Zena CSS virtual platforms address this problem by providing a reliable, virtualized hardware and software platform where automotive customers can develop and test the functionality and performance of their IVI and ADAS stacks, thereby reducing timelines and integration issues.” — Peter Sirota, Chief Executive Officer, Mapbox

Mapbox and Arm are working closely to provide developers early access to virtual platforms supporting Zena CSS. Sign up to learn more about developing with Mapbox on Zena CSS.