Arm Ltd. today revealed details of its first-generation Zena Compute Subsystem (CSS) for Automotive, which it expects will power the future of transportation. Built on Armv9 Automotive Enhanced (AE) technology, Zena CSS is the company’s first pre-integrated and pre-validated platform for AI-defined vehicles.

“Bringing innovation to drivers faster is one of the toughest challenges automakers face today,” said Dipti Vachani, SVP & GM, Automotive Line of Business, at Arm. “Traditional silicon development times often delay vehicle rollouts, preventing carmakers from delivering the AI-powered features that today’s drivers expect. That changes with Arm Zena Compute Subsystems.”

The Zena CSS enables automakers to launch new vehicle models at least one year faster with a standardized, pre-integrated compute platform that dramatically shortens development cycles and enables software teams to start early, before silicon even exists. This accelerates time to market, scales AI capabilities across vehicle lines, and helps automakers stay competitive in the rapidly evolving era of the AI-defined vehicle.

“To compete in the AI era, automakers need scalable compute without compromising safety, power efficiency, or flexibility,” added Vachani. “Zena CSS reduces chip development time by up to 12 months and cuts silicon engineering effort by up to 20% per project, helping OEMs and silicon providers bring new vehicle models to market sooner with intelligent voice and touch interfaces, immersive digital cockpit experiences, driver assistance and automation, and real-time awareness.”

In the last five years, Arm-based chip shipments to the automotive market have tripled – a testament to the industry’s trust in the company’s platform, according to Vachani. Now she is pitching the AI-defined vehicle era on Arm.

“With Zena CSS, we are giving automakers the tools to build software-defined, AI-enabled vehicles faster, smarter, and more efficiently,” she said. “Pairing that with the unique advantage of cloud-to-car parity—developing and testing on the same Arm architecture in the cloud that you will deploy on in the car—means our partners can be confident that software will run seamlessly from the smallest sensor to the Arm-based cloud.”

 

Built on Armv9 Automotive Enhanced

According to Arm, nearly every global OEM today relies on its technology as the foundational compute platform. The next generation of vehicles will demand even more pervasive and personalized intelligence that adapts and updates in real time across the vehicle.

Next-generation vehicles need to run diverse workloads, including advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), in-vehicle infotainment (IVI), and vehicle control systems with varying safety requirements and real-time constraints on a single platform. The standardized compute platform gives OEMs and silicon providers the ability to reuse architectures and software, accelerating global vehicle delivery, and simplifying system development and integration, while streamlining functional safety and security certification.

“This is critical because developing custom hardware and software stacks for every vehicle model and application is costly, time-consuming, and burdensome to validate and certify,” said Vachani. “Importantly, Zena CSS allows our partners to innovate and differentiate on top of a standard platform in areas that add distinct value to their product lines.

The Zena CSS can help to reduce the overall engineering burden, both upfront and over time. This is especially important in the automotive industry, where timelines are tight and feature sets are continuously expanding.

To reduce costs and complexity during the development process, it provides up to 20% fewer silicon engineering resources required versus traditional IP based designs, freeing up teams to focus on differentiating capabilities tailored to AI-defined vehicle workloads, and up to 30% reduction in porting effort from platform to platform through software standardization, saving software development time and costs.

This leads to an overall lower total vehicle platform development cost, with the consistent Arm architecture providing the ability to scale across ADAS, central compute, and IVI use cases for both monolithic and chiplet-based silicon designs.

 

Empowering developers now

Following last year’s IP-focused virtual platforms, Arm partners can begin software development on Zena CSS immediately using cloud-based virtual platform support from AWS, Cadence, Siemens, and Synopsys, accelerating time-to-market for software innovation by up to two years.

“Virtual platforms are a proven path to smoother integration and a faster time-to-market, especially in safety-critical domains,” said Vachani. “This allows engineering teams to begin hardware/software co-design and validation well ahead of silicon availability, accelerating development cycles by up to two years. For the AI-defined vehicle, developers can use virtual platforms to validate AI workloads and edge inference behavior in realistic simulations.”

The company’s ecosystem of more than 20 million developers—including Denso, GitHub, Green Hills, Mapbox, Red Hat, Panasonic Automotive—can now build and test across the full software stack and on a common compute platform.

Leading OEMs and major silicon providers have already licensed Zena CSS or are in advanced stages of engagement.

“The transition to software-defined vehicles demands a shift in how we approach compute architectures,” said Magnus Östberg, Chief Software Officer, Mercedes-Benz AG. “Standardized, pre-verified compute subsystems like Arm Zena CSS can significantly accelerate development timelines and reduce complexity across the industry. By integrating such solutions early in the development chain, the automotive industry can streamline complexity and establish a stronger foundation for delivering the safe, intelligent, and connected experiences that define the next generation of vehicles.”

Arm expects the majority of the industry to build on the Zena CSS family in the coming years.

 

Zena CSS specifics

Zena is a pre-integrated compute platform that brings together verified, low power, high performance IP, a dedicated safety island and runtime security engine, reference firmware, and software support into a complete CSS ready for silicon implementation. The solution gives automakers the confidence to move faster, reduce costs and risk, and deliver more differentiated, intelligent vehicle experiences, from concept to production.

“In an industry where vehicle development typically spans three to five years, Arm Zena CSS helps to significantly reduce timelines for both hardware and software delivery,” according to Suraj Gajendra, VP Product and Solutions, Automotive Line of Business, at Arm. “Now, as the industry moves towards the AI-defined vehicle—where intelligence is distributed across domains, and features and workloads are continuously updated over-the-air and then executed at the edge—Arm Zena CSS provides the unified foundation for scalable, safety-capable compute, enabling automakers to keep pace and innovate at scale.

Specifically, it delivers 16 Armv9-based Cortex-A720AE cores, performance optimized for ADAS and IVI applications. Its Cortex-R82AE-powered safety island, unique to Zena CSS, is used for real-time ASIL-D processing capabilities such as fault management, safety monitoring, system control, and SoC boot. Its runtime security engine has safety-capable hardware root of trust (RoT), leveraging Arm TrustZone technology to manage SoC-level security. CPU coherency and chip-to-chip connectivity are provided by CMN S3AE.

Optional image signal processing is powered by Mali-C720AE and Mali GPU for ADAS use cases, including surround view and driver monitoring. Support for easy integration of accelerators and partner-specific logic helps to meet evolving workload demands for advanced, AI-capable SoC design.

The Zena CSS scales from IVI to central compute and Level 2+ ADAS, giving automakers the flexibility to deploy across multiple vehicle lines and performance tiers without reinventing the compute stack or starting from scratch on safety certification. Its pervasive Arm compute architecture means the automotive ecosystem can reuse and port many elements of software, including firmware, middleware, operating systems, and even applications, across differentiated Zena CSS-based SoCs from different vendors.

 

Standards-based firmware and SOAFEE Blueprints

Zena CSS is designed to support open, scalable software development for modern and future automotive applications. Arm is making its reference firmware available across the ecosystem, with each ingredient, like safety and security, pre-verified and fully integrated.

Zena CSS is built on open standards, including Autosar, COVESA, eSync, and Virtio, and is backed by SOAFEE (Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge), with 150+ members such as General Motors, CARIAD, Continental, and Tata Motors. It is tightly aligned with SOAFEE, with the community developing Blueprints that are enabled and built for the CSS.

These are designed for real-world automotive scenarios, including the Autoware Open AD Kit Blueprint to accelerate autonomous driving capabilities, Denso’s latest Blueprint for mixed-criticality safety requirements, and Panasonic Automotive Systems’ Blueprints for developing and deploying digital cockpit and IVI solutions.

“Building on our ongoing collaboration with Arm and our work, including that within the SOAFEE community, we see tremendous value in porting our SOAFEE Blueprints based on the standard device virtualization framework VirtIO—such as Unified HMI and vSkipGen—to the standardized, scalable platform offered by Arm Zena CSS,” said Masashige Mizuyama, Executive Vice President and CTO, Panasonic Automotive Systems Co., Ltd. “Virtual prototyping on a common compute foundation not only reduces time-to-market but also aligns with our vision of a more software-centric, flexible automotive ecosystem.”

The SOAFEE Blueprints work on top of Zena CSS thanks to SystemReady, Arm’s certification and compliance program, and other industry-standard APIs that give automotive OEMs flexibility in their software decisions. New automotive extensions to Arm SystemReady will be fully available to the ecosystem at the end of 2025, helping to ensure that operating systems and software stacks for automotive applications work seamlessly across different hardware.

“By providing standards-based firmware and software on top of Arm Zena CSS, we are delivering a full-stack solution that allows the software ecosystem to build on and create differentiated applications across automotive markets,” concluded Gajendra. “This also supports software reusability and portability for faster application and feature deployment across platforms. Through this pre-built ecosystem for Arm Zena CSS—where SOAFEE has played a vital role—we are reducing effort and risk for all our automotive partners.”