NEC has introduced its second generation of image processors for automotive safety systems.

IMAPCAR2 processors execute up to 270Gops and can be used to detect nearby objects such as vehicles, pedestrians and lane markers in real time, enabling the development of obstacle-detection, forward-collision warning, lane-departure warning and other automotive safety systems that require intensive computing.

With support for both SIMD and MIMD operations, the 128 processing engines now support 16bits rather than the earlier SIMD-only generation’s eight.

Amongst the four new devices, there is one priced 80% lower than previous products.

Other image-recognition target markets are: information technology, security and robotics.

Samples of the first device, IMAPCAR2-300, are scheduled in first half of 2009.

More information: www.necel.com