[About Geely] How do automotive electronics developers cope with the challenges of the intelligent era?

Under the impact of new technologies and new car-making forces, the drawbacks of traditional car development methods are becoming increasingly apparent. Under the traditional car development model, cars are regarded as special machines with extremely high safety performance requirements, so their electrical structures are mostly customized, non-scalable, and difficult to reuse; in addition, traditional cars do not have high requirements for data processing speed, and the bandwidth of traditional on-board buses is relatively low. One of the characteristics of intelligent cars is that a large amount of data that needs to be processed in real time will be collected, and it is difficult to meet the needs of intelligence by using traditional on-board bus architectures; in addition, traditional automotive electronic systems also have the characteristics of low processing power, complex software update operations, and high correlation between different modules.

New car manufacturers, represented by Tesla, view cars as large-scale mobile smart devices and make bold innovations in hardware selection, platform construction, software development, and update and maintenance. While winning user support, they also lead the trend of car development. Traditional car manufacturers have also followed suit and invested more resources in exploring new architectures and new development processes.

Both old and new automotive forces are investing heavily in the new development model of automotive systems, and higher requirements must be placed on automotive developers. On August 16, the "New Electronics" media information service platform and Mentor, a Siemens Business jointly launched the [Enter Geely] Digital Intelligent Automotive Electronics Development Technology Seminar, and invited Inova, MPS, Western Digital, Mouser, ITECH and other companies to participate. In response to the issues of common concern to automotive electronics developers, from chips, modules to software, the systematic method of engineering developers to deal with new hardware, new architecture and new development processes was sorted out. More than 200 professional visitors from Geely Automobile Research Institute attended the seminar.

Starting from hardware

There is no doubt that the proportion of software in automotive electronics development will increase. It is not new for OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers to develop chips themselves, because OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers have a deeper understanding of vehicle application requirements, and customized chips can also widen the gap with competitors at the hardware level. However, some OEMs or Tier 1 suppliers may not have enough experience in chip-level hardware development. However, with the help of EDA tools, OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers can shorten the learning time and speed up the development progress.

Ling Lin, General Manager of Mentor, a Siemens Business China, said at the Digital Intelligent Automotive Electronics Development Technology Seminar that Mentor and Siemens provide users with a full-process digital solution that covers everything from design to production with seamless connectivity. With Mentor's complete EDA design and verification tools from IC to system, automotive customers are fully able to cope with the challenges brought by the new automotive technology trend and smoothly enter the era of intelligent automotive development. He said: "Our history in the automotive electronics field can be traced back more than 30 years. We have complete solutions in chips, circuit boards and systems. After the merger with Siemens, the two sides complement each other in the automotive field. With our integrated development environment, developers can efficiently develop automotive systems."

Ling Lin, General Manager, Mentor, a Siemens Business China

Accelerate development, simulation and certification

The increased degree of hardware customization and the increase in software development content have increased the workload of automotive system development, but the overall vehicle development cycle has not been lengthened, and there is a trend of shortening it.

Zhang Jun, senior technical manager of hardware acceleration verification platform at Mentor, a Siemens Business, pointed out that future cars are undergoing a large number of technological integrations. Electrification, sensors, Internet of Vehicles, cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, etc. are closely connected in the vehicle system, especially at the lowest technical level, where sensors and integrated circuits interact with each other in various subsystems of the vehicle. However, the complexity of automotive system development, simulation and certification lies in the fact that the vehicle system itself is only part of the vehicle operating environment. In real scenarios, there are other vehicles, pedestrians, and various facilities, which makes the verification of automotive systems a difficult and arduous task. "There are millions of scenarios that need to be checked, and each scenario has variables. Because the original data is not inclusive enough, safety and security issues are further complicated."

Jun Zhang, Senior Technical Manager, Hardware Acceleration Verification Platform, Mentor, a Siemens Business

Zhang Jun said that the only way to speed up vehicle verification and simulation is to virtualize the entire system environment and vehicle. Siemens solutions provide an innovative approach to verifying autonomous vehicle designs by integrating heterogeneous elements of the system in one environment: Tools that simulate real environmental conditions and sensor outputs in response to that environment. Tools that verify circuits that perform decision calculations given sensor inputs. Tools that make decisions for calculations and apply them to virtualized versions of the mechanical systems controlled by those decisions.

In view of the complex functions, high computing density and high cost of autonomous driving, Mentor also provides an automated driving total solution. Chen Mingyao, China Sales Director of Mentor, a Siemens Business, said: "From ECU simulation, hardware platform simulation, to embedded software development, Mentor, a Siemens Business has a complete solution for the autonomous driving platform. Domestic customers have high requirements for delivery time, but customers have given us great feedback on our support."

      

Chen Mingyao, Sales Director of Mentor, a Siemens Business China

Speed, Capacity and EMI

The intelligentization of automobiles poses a great challenge to the vehicle bus and vehicle storage. According to Intel's estimate, the amount of data generated by a fully autonomous vehicle in one day may be as high as 4,000GB. In the near future, the changes in the vehicle dashboard (large screen display) and audio and video entertainment functions have overwhelmed the traditional vehicle bus, so new technologies need to be introduced to carry the increasing data throughput.

Inova Semiconductor, headquartered in Germany, is a chip design company that mainly develops in-vehicle high-speed serial buses (SerDes) and in-vehicle LED drivers. Thomas Rothhaupt, Inova's marketing and sales director, said that using APIX3 SerDes technology, the video, audio, Ethernet and control signals of the infotainment system can be transmitted to the remote display screen in real time with high quality on a single shielded twisted pair (STP) or coaxial cable (Coax). APIX3 products can support a bandwidth of up to 12 gigabits per second (12Gpbs) and can correspond to video interfaces in formats such as LVDS, DSI, CSI, HDMI and DisplayPort. APIX3 can also extend multi-screen applications, optimize the main architecture design of the audio and video entertainment system, and save development time and costs.

In his speech, Thomas Rothhaupt demonstrated the 4K display and multi-screen solution implemented using APIX3.

Thomas Rothhaupt, Director of Marketing and Sales at Inova

The increase in data volume has also directly led to an increase in the demand for in-vehicle storage. Zhang Dan, director of product marketing at Western Digital, said in his speech that as the degree of vehicle networking and autonomous driving increases, the storage required in the car will continue to increase. Among them, advanced in-vehicle infotainment systems will require 256GB, and automated systems will require more than 1TB of capacity. It is expected that by 2022, the average storage capacity of each vehicle will exceed 2TB.

Zhang Dan pointed out that compared with consumer-grade storage, automotive applications have higher requirements for NAND flash memory in terms of temperature, data retention and read/write speed. The 3D TLC NAND flash memory launched by Western Digital in recent years has more advantages than the previous 2D MLC technology: higher reliability, reduced interference between storage cells, stronger electron capture capability per layer, better data retention. And it can achieve higher capacity. The iNAND® AT EM132 embedded flash drive launched in April this year has a capacity of 256GB.

Zhang Dan, Director of Product Marketing at Western Digital

In view of the characteristics of in-vehicle applications, Western Digital has also added functions such as status monitoring, intelligent partitioning, manual refresh, and durable expansion to its products.

As the proportion of electronics in vehicle systems continues to increase, engineers are more and more likely to encounter EMI problems. Cheng Lei, MPS automotive electronics field application supervisor, shared his EMI design experience in switching power supply design. He said: "With the development of new energy vehicles, autonomous driving and in-vehicle interconnection technology, these more and more electrified components have brought about the widespread application of DCDC chips, and also generated more and more EMI problems. Due to the wide range and low restrictions of automotive electronic testing, in these small-volume and multi-wiring applications, the EMI problem of DCDC is a new problem that needs to be solved urgently. As a leader in the power supply field, MPS has unique technical advantages in automotive electronic power solutions. MPS solves the system design problems of hardware engineers, making system design more efficient and system cost lower. At the same time, with the popularization of automotive electronic electrification, OEMs have higher and higher requirements for automotive EMI, and switching power supplies are the main source of noise. MPS has rich chip design experience and system design experience, helping hardware engineers to more easily pass the increasingly stringent EMI challenges."