Athos Spins Out Of Mercedes With Chiplet Concept for AVs

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After five years of technology incubation, Athos Silicon has officially spun out of Mercedes-Benz. The startup was founded in March 2025 based on a research project underway at Mercedes since 2020. Mercedes has made a strategic investment in Athos, including “substantial” IP, according to the company, and the OEM and its spinout will continue to collaborate on Athos’ mSoC reference design, Polaris.

As far back as 2020, the Athos team had been looking at how to address functional safety for autonomy since silicon on the market wasn’t sufficient, Athos CEO Charnjiv Bangar told EE Times.

“That led us on this journey of fundamentally looking at what is needed for highly reliable and safe compute,” he said. “We started with the problem of autonomy, and with problem statements from [Mercedes’] functional safety teams and application teams in Germany, and built the architecture from the ground up.”

That architecture – the mSoC – was developed for functional safety first and foremost. Realizing its potential applications were broader than automotive, Mercedes decided to spin out Bangar’s team as Athos at the end of 2024. The complex IP took a while to tease out, Bangar said, but today Athos has the agreements in place to sell its technology to anyone – whether that’s Mercedes’ competitors in the automotive arena, or to companies building planes, drones, robots or any other autonomy application.

“[Mercedes has] a strategic interest in seeing Athos succeed,” Bangar said. “Not only are they an investor bringing in the IP, but the motivation for them was to see the IP commercialized.”

Mercedes is making certain assets available to Athos, including a test car which Athos is integrating its prototypes into so it can validate its technology stack.

Reference design

Polaris, the company’s first-generation mSoC, will be able to drop into new Mercedes vehicles. It includes three compute die, a cache in the center (DreamBig Semiconductor’s chiplet hub) and a full-fledged NPU from an undisclosed supplier that will support all ML operators. All these chiplets are from third-party suppliers (none are made in-house).

Compute die are coming from a supplier who already makes automotive-grade SoC chips – this is the first time this particular supplier is offering chiplets, Athos CTO François Piednoël told EE Times.

“We use a full system-on-chip [chiplet], and that system has a memory controller, GPU, CPU and everything – we do not intend to do much disaggregation,” he said, noting that specially-designed disaggregated GPU and CPU chiplets would require a lot of investment since it would require many tape-outs, which would be expensive. The company has instead chosen to disaggregate at the system level, he said.

Athos’ team, after leaving Mercedes, came up with a voting mechanism which works with a minimum of three chiplets to guarantee safety. Three chiplets means there’s no single point of failure; each chiplet monitors the other two for software issues like memory overflows, and hardware issues like radiation-driven bit-flips (critical in aerospace applications, for example).  

Chiplets’ scalability advantages will apply going forward. Using a complete SoC chiplet means adding more chiplets would bump up all of Polaris’ computing performance parameters. This can be achieved in a few months versus years for new silicon. (The voting system requires odd numbers of compute chiplets so the voting never ends in a tie; a next-generation version of Polaris will use 7).

Piednoël said that a future level 4 robotaxi will need a backup for its backup to avoid having to stop the ride if something goes wrong (since the passenger would be unable to take over).

“We can enable very easily, just as a matter of cost, a backup for the backup,” Piednoël said. “That means we can do non-interrupted level four. If you were to try to do this with multiple chips on a main board, you would end up with a board that probably needs four or six chips minimum.”

Enabled by chiplets, this is part of how the company wants to enable higher performance at lower cost points, he said.

Software complexity

Software for functional safety applications is notoriously complex.

“[Polaris] has a scheduler which allows us to remove most of the modern threading that used to be the difficult part to certify,” Piednoël said. “Every time you create a thread, you need to make sure that the programmer of that thread didn’t do anything that can cause problems for the other threads – you need exhaustive validation to do that into a level three stack, [since] that’s about 1,200 programs competing with each other.”

Athos’ AMBA-compatible chiplet-based approach simplifies the software stack tremendously using hardware scheduling.

Customers will use Polaris with their own autonomy software stacks for varied types of system. A future family of Polaris SKUs could offer different CPU/NPU performance levels for different applications, Bangar said. Athos’ hardware is agnostic to customers’ upper levels of software, since Athos’ stack has an orchestration layer which directs the workload across Polaris’ different chiplets, he added.

“The challenge we see when it comes to chiplet technology is that you have UCIe, which has standardized the physical interconnect electrically, but nobody’s working on the interoperability problem,” Bangar said. “How do you talk to chiplets from different vendors in a standardized way? That’s the layer of software that Athos will bring, and that abstracts the OEM from having to worry about that at the hardware firmware layer.”

Initial Polaris SKUs will be designed for robust level 3 highway driving. Piednoël’s vision is that the car will monitor the driver and be able to take over if they become distracted, with a seamless transition. “We believe there will be no buttons,” he said.

Highway roadmap

Polaris uses third-party silicon, but custom silicon for future generations is under development by Athos’ small but experienced team today. This is enabled by advances in AI-enabled EDA tools which are making the design process more efficient, Piednoël said.

“From an architectural point of view, I have put together this chiplet pretty quickly on the architecture side,” he said. “In the past, you would have needed a team of five or ten people – I’m almost done with the thing in a few months by myself.”

For Polaris, Athos’ partners are currently bringing up the individual chiplets. They will then be sent for assembly into the final system-on-package. Bangar expects to have Polaris engineering samples back around the middle of 2026, but the company already has some development silicon which it is using to test its software, as well as a software emulator of Polaris it is making available to customers, including Mercedes.

• For more detail on Polaris and Athos’ safety concepts, view François Piednoël’s keynote presentation at EE Times’ virtual conference “The Future Of Chiplets” which you can catch on-demand here.  

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See also:

A Guide to Building Chiplets Today While Shaping Tomorrow’s Standards 

Chiplets Consolidation Wave is Just Beginning

The Chiplet Economy: Three Pillars for Semiconductor Success

Driving Toward the Goal of Making Automotive Chiplets Viable