Lattice Certus-NX FPGAs Optimized for Automotive Applications

There are many reasons why today’s cars need semiconductor chips, including consumer demand for electric vehicles (which require complex electronics to maximize battery life), advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and infotainment systems that support voice control and gesture recognition. In addition to external AI vision systems to support ADAS and autonomous driving functions, automotive developers are exploring the use of in-vehicle vision systems and AI capabilities to monitor not only the state of the driver (fatigue, distraction, physical impairment), but also the state of passengers (for example, to ensure that children or pets are not accidentally locked in the car) or the state of items in the car (for example, in a taxi, to ensure that passengers do not forget their backpacks, packages, mobile phones, wallets, etc.) .

As many cars now use V2X or 5G networks, the interconnection between vehicles is becoming more and more extensive, which greatly increases the demand for interconnected systems in cars. These systems need to comply with local regulatory safety requirements to protect data privacy and security and prevent malicious intrusion.

Lattice has long provided low-power FPGAs optimized for automotive applications. These automotive-grade FPGAs include devices from the Lattice CrossLink™ family (for high-speed video and sensor applications) and the Lattice Mach™ family (for platform management and safety applications). Now, we are pleased to announce that our general-purpose FPGA family is also available in automotive grade with the introduction of the Lattice Certus™-NX automotive-grade devices.

Certus-NX automotive-grade FPGAs are ideal for tasks such as battery management, in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system management, in-vehicle network interconnection (IVN), and ADAS system sensor data co-processing.

Some Automotive Applications of Lattice FPGAs

The Certus-NX series of products based on the Lattice Nexus™ FPGA platform have the characteristics of high capacity, high performance, low power consumption, and can provide leading high I/O density in a small package. These devices support SERDES up to 10 Gbps, have up to 150K lookup tables, and the most on-chip storage resources in their class for efficient processing. Because Certus-NX automotive-grade FPGAs meet the AEC-Q100 standard, automotive customers can now also take advantage of these features and advantages. In addition to the high reliability of the device itself (the soft error rate is 100 times lower than similar FPGAs), passing this certification also means that Certus-NX automotive-grade FPGAs are very suitable for use in harsh automotive environments.

Safety and security applications require authenticated and encrypted electronic components to prevent cyberattacks. To protect the bitstream from unauthorized access, Certus-NX FPGAs support AES-256 encryption and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) bitstream authentication (the smallest FPGA on the market to support ECDSA).

Certus-NX automotive-grade FPGAs offer features and performance levels far beyond competing FPGAs:

Our intuitive and easy-to-use design tools now support Certus-NX automotive-grade FPGAs, including Lattice Diamond™ and Lattice Radiant™. Also available is Lattice Propel™, a design environment with a complete set of graphical and command-line tools for creating, analyzing, compiling, and debugging hardware designs and software for FPGA-based processor systems.

The Lattice mVision™ and Lattice sensAI™ solution stacks also support Certus-NX automotive-grade FPGAs, so designers can leverage its modular hardware platforms, reference designs, neural network IP cores, and custom design services to accelerate the design of automotive vision systems and AI applications.