National Technology's N32 series general-purpose MCUs help automotive EDR applications

Industrial policies give rise to a large automotive EDR market

The "Notice on the Implementation of Amendment No. 2 to GB7258-2017" issued by the Equipment Industry Development Center of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology supplemented the "Technical Conditions for Motor Vehicle Operation Safety" and clearly required that from January 1, 2022, all newly produced passenger cars in China must be equipped with an event data recorder system (EDR) or a DVR on-board video driving recording system that complies with regulations.

In 2020, my country's passenger car sales reached 25.31 million units, with approximately 20 million new car sales each year. It is estimated that the overall incremental market size of EDR can reach 6 billion yuan per year. According to ReportLiner research, the EDR installation rate of Chinese passenger cars was 9% in 2021. It is expected that with the mandatory installation of EDR by policies, the penetration rate of China's EDR industry will rise from 7.12% to more than 70% in 2022, and even soar to more than 90% in 2024.

As a standard feature of new cars in the future, EDR will drive the demand for MCU, storage, sensors and other chips. Under the strong promotion of national industrial policies, EDR will be rapidly popularized, and the relevant industrial chain will benefit greatly. MCU chips play a very critical role as control chips for EDR applications, which puts forward higher technical and quality requirements for the overall stability of MCU products. Chip companies with leading product technology, the ability to provide safe and reliable products, and a robust supply chain to support partners in product application innovation will have more opportunities.

The important role of MCU in EDR applications

EDR is a device or system composed of one or more on-board electronic modules. It has the function of monitoring, collecting and recording vehicle and occupant protection system data before, during and after a collision event. It is commonly known as a "black box". From a hardware perspective, compared with on-board video recorders, dedicated EDRs have a smaller overall structure, higher requirements for equipment stability and data reliability, and EDRs require dedicated reading devices to obtain the data. In addition, EDRs record more types of data items, including vehicle speed, braking, steering, throttle, gear, time and other real-time operating parameter status information of the vehicle. In this regard, the national standard GB 39732-2020 "Automobile Event Data Recording System" has very clear technical requirements.

The EDR controller mainly involves related chip products and components such as the main controller (MCU), sensors, memory, CAN transceiver, and security algorithm components. Among them, the MCU main control chip is responsible for parsing and compressing the vehicle information collected by the sensor, such as vehicle speed, driver's seat belt status, turn signal switch status, brake pedal position, and then writing it into the memory chip, receiving and sending real-time data through the car CAN data bus, and the security component is used for data encryption and decryption. For EDR applications, there are rigid requirements for the high-speed computing processing capabilities of the MCU chip, large-capacity eFlash storage, embedded cryptographic hardware acceleration, high-speed ADC sampling, and interface support such as CAN and LIN. Therefore, the main development trend of MCU chips used for EDR is to have product technical features such as high integration, high performance, high reliability, security, and low power consumption.

Case sharing: EDR solution based on N32G435

Nationwide Technology has currently mass-produced more than 100 MCU products in 16 series, which have been recognized by benchmark customers in various industries and have been widely used. The N32G455 series, N32G435 series, N32G430 series, etc. all meet the application requirements of EDR products, and have completed the introduction and mass production of EDR products for many customers. The new N32A455 series automotive-grade MCU, which is currently in the sample testing stage, will be more widely used in automotive electronics applications including EDR.

The following is an EDR system solution implemented by a customer based on the National Technology N32G435 MCU.

EDR application solution based on N32G435

The EDR system has functions such as power management, system self-test, gravity sensing, CAN communication, cyclic signal acquisition (CAN interface), data storage and overwriting, offline configuration, diagnosis, BootLoader, etc. It also supports software upgrades, has abnormal working environment detection and diagnosis, and can be adapted to a variety of vehicle models.

The advantages of N32G435 in EDR applications include:

1. High-speed performance: Cortex-M4 core, supports FPU floating-point operations, and can quickly complete the calculation process.

2. Encrypted memory: Built-in 128KB embedded encrypted Flash, supports encrypted storage, partition management and data protection, supports hardware ECC verification, 100,000 erase and write times, 10 years of data retention. Up to 32Kbytes SRAM, supports hardware parity check.

3. Rich interfaces: With 12-bit ADC and a maximum sampling rate of 5Msps, it can quickly collect various analog quantities; it supports CAN interface and is easy to connect to the vehicle system.

4. High reliability: It meets the design requirements of -40℃~105℃, has high reliability, and ensures stable operation of the system.

5. Security upgrade: Hardware-integrated cryptographic algorithm acceleration engine, supports national and international algorithms, and high-security FOTA ensures secure backup and upgrade of firmware code

Through continuous innovation in core technologies, Nationwide Technologies has continuously improved the processing performance of chip products such as MCUs and significantly reduced product energy consumption. With open source solutions and comprehensive customer introduction support, it has further reduced the overall cost of customers in the automotive electronics field, created more excellent automotive products to market, and continuously surpassed itself in technological innovation, product quality, and service capabilities, creating value for more customers.