Imagination Technologies has contributed its DXS automotive GPU IP to the European CHASSIS program’s new Automotive Base Die, a 5 nm chiplet project intended to support open, standardized chiplet architectures for software-defined vehicles. The move positions Imagination’s functionally safe GPU technology as part of a broader European effort to build interoperable automotive compute platforms. It is also a useful signal from a company with deep automotive history but a less explicit silicon roadmap than some of its IP peers.
(Source: Imagination)
Imagination Technologies has contributed its latest functionally safe automotive GPU IP to the European CHASSIS program’s new Automotive Base Die, a 5 nm chiplet project intended to help establish an open and standardized chiplet ecosystem for software-defined vehicles. The company says its DXS GPU IP will extend the base die into graphics-rich cockpit and in-vehicle infotainment workloads, while also providing a flexible coprocessor option for AI-related tasks.
The Automotive Base Die is being positioned as the central communication and integration hub for automotive SoC infrastructure. It is designed to integrate third-party chiplets using UCIe, the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express standard. The CHASSIS effort is funded through the Chips Joint Undertaking and backed by European automotive and semiconductor players including BMW, Imec, and Bosch.
Markus Mosen, CEO of Imagination Technologies, said: “By contributing to the Automotive Base Die, Imagination is ensuring that the open chiplet ecosystem can deliver the responsive displays and in-vehicle entertainment that OEMs want in their next generation of cars.”
Imagination’s DXS GPU is aimed at cockpit, infotainment, and ADAS graphics and compute workloads. The company describes DXS as ASIL-B certifiable and says its distributed safety mechanisms are intended to reduce the performance, power, and area overhead typically associated with fault detection in safety-related processing logic. Imagination also says DXS delivers up to 10× compute performance over previous generations for automotive workloads including driver monitoring and lidar/radar data pre-processing.
The company’s automotive positioning is not new. Imagination has supplied GPU IP into automotive markets for years, and DXS was launched as its highest-performance automotive GPU IP, with a focus on both graphics and compute. We previously reported that DXS offered 50% higher peak performance than Imagination’s prior automotive GPUs, with up to 6 TFLOPS and 24 TOPS at 1 GHz, rising to 36 TOPS at 1.5 GHz.
CHASSIS itself is an interesting European project. Coordinated by Bosch, the three-year program is focused on creating an open chiplet ecosystem for secure and scalable technology in software-defined mobility. The broader consortium includes European OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers, semiconductor companies, EDA providers, software companies, and research institutions.
(Source: CHASSIS)
Automotive compute is moving from distributed ECUs toward centralized and zonal architectures, and chiplets are being explored as a way to avoid the cost, risk, and rigidity of ever-larger monolithic SoCs. A reusable base die that can host interoperable third-party chiplets would give automakers and suppliers more room to configure compute platforms by vehicle class, software requirement, and regional supply-chain preference.
What do we think?
The most interesting part of this announcement is the phrase “chiplet-ready.” Unlike Arm, Semidynamics, MIPS, and other IP companies that have been clearer about silicon, chiplets, or platform-level ambitions, Imagination has not yet laid out a full silicon story.
GPU IP companies have traditionally lived inside other companies’ SoCs. But as automotive platforms become more modular, the question is whether IP remains a licensed block, becomes a hardened subsystem, or eventually becomes part of a reference chiplet strategy. Imagination is not announcing a discrete GPU chiplet here. It is contributing IP to a project designed to test the practical foundations for such systems. It is not clear what Imagination gets out of this initiative to move them forward on the silicon front, but it at least implies chiplets are a part of the company strategy.
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