What iteration directions and technical challenges will automotive chip IP face?

In recent years, China's automobile sales have continued to increase its proportion of global sales, from 23.7% in 2011 to 32.5% in 2020, showing a steady growth trend. In the process of development, the market share of domestic automobile brands is also constantly increasing. Data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers shows that in 2020 and 2021, the market share of Chinese brand passenger cars is higher than that of German and Japanese brands, and the market share has increased from 38.42% to 44.43%.

The domestic automobile industry has achieved overtaking in a corner, but the localization process of the automobile industry, including chip suppliers, first-tier suppliers, host suppliers, operating systems , travel services, and travel operations, still has a long way to go, especially the development of automotive chips. focus on. So where are the development opportunities for the automotive chip industry and what challenges does it face?

Zhao Yongchao, head of Amou Technology’s intelligent IoT and automotive business lines, believes that the “new four modernizations” are opportunities for the localization of the automotive chip industry. Currently, domestically produced cars are accelerating their electrification. It is expected that 30% of cars will be intelligent in 2022, and this number will reach 70% by 2030. In addition, networking and sharing are also conducive to the development of China's automotive chip industry.

What needs attention is that the "new four modernizations" bring greater technical challenges, such as multi- sensor fusion, algorithm optimization, hardware virtualization, etc., which all require a more powerful computing platform, and the vehicle E/E architecture is also changing. It is generally believed in the industry that the vehicle E/E architecture will transform from traditional architecture, domain architecture, to centralized architecture.

What follows is that the car will become a large mobile platform, with high-performance, on-board, computing, and embedded computers as a centralized architecture, connected to different sensors through different domain controllers for fusion. The centralized architecture can greatly simplify the difficulties in algorithms, multi-sensor fusion, and complex software and operating systems, so it is also a unanimously expected development direction in the industry.

In response to the development trend of the "new four modernizations" of automobiles, IP platforms require higher performance. Take autonomous driving as an example. According to different needs, the higher the level of autonomous driving, the higher the computing power, algorithm, and security requirements required. In terms of computing power, the L2+ level requires at least 10 TFLOPS. The L3-4 level requires 50-100 TFLOPS, and higher levels also require a processing capacity of 1000TFLOPS. How to quickly launch chip products that meet market demand has become a question that automobile manufacturers and IP manufacturers need to discuss together.

Source: Anmou Technology

In terms of automotive electronic SOC chip interface IP, Xinyaohui has launched a complete solution. In autonomous driving chips, the interface IP includes LPDDR, PCIe, Ethernet , display interface HDMI and other interfaces, which is one of the most complex parts. It should be noted that the core bus interface of automotive electronics is also constantly evolving, including bandwidth improvements, increased functions, etc.

According to the official introduction, Core Yaohui has launched a full set of interface IP based on domestic 14nm and 12nm advanced process platforms, including "Parallel D2D PHY IP" and "Serial 112G D2D SerDes PHY IP" that support UCIe protocol and are compatible with diverse D2D and C2C scenarios. The latter has the characteristics of high energy efficiency ratio and high bandwidth utilization.

Arm Technology has launched a car-grade IP product for the automotive industry chain - the "Star" STAR-MC2 car-grade embedded processor. It is its second-generation CPU and is based on Arm 's v8.1-M architecture design. The first generation has increased the unit computing density of the product, with a main frequency of 235MHz, a 45% increase in scalar processing capability, a 200% increase in vector processing performance, and improved car-grade reliability. Zhao Yongchao said that STAR-MC2 will be widely used in system control of large chips such as automotive-grade MCUs .

As the "new four modernizations" of automobiles accelerate the development, automobile chips have higher requirements for reliability and safety. In this process, IP manufacturers will play a vital role in the localization trend of automobile chips. effect.