Four characteristics of the automotive ecosystem: CFD, FuSa, Aging, Vision

Although Cadence does not design tire systems, tires are becoming increasingly connected to electronics. Cars used to have no tire pressure monitoring, but now cars have a pressure monitor inside the tire that communicates wirelessly with the car, allowing the actual tire pressure of all four tires to be displayed on the dashboard. Therefore, even the most basic components like tires are becoming more and more electronic.

This article will summarize the four major characteristics of today's automotive ecosystem:

CFD: Computational Fluid Dynamics

FuSa: Functional Safety

Aging: It does not just mean aging. In the automotive field, aging refers to analyzing the performance of transistors (especially analog circuits) within the 20-year service life of the chip.

Vision: Cadence Tensilica has a complete Vision product line that is widely used in the automotive industry.

01

CFD: Computational Fluid Dynamics

The traditional approach to car design is to make precise models and then test and measure them in wind tunnels; this process is very expensive. Computational fluid dynamics can be used as a virtual wind tunnel, where measurements of aspects such as wind resistance are taken in the computer. CFD is also used in engine design to analyze thermal issues, design turbines, and more.

There is a passage in an article titled "Highlights Of The Automotive Aerodynamics And Thermal Management Conference" that helps us understand the scale of the design resources required:

Audi spent 40 months, 5 million hours of CPU running, and 250 hours of wind tunnel experiments to finally develop the latest Q4 eTron, with the entire process focusing on aerodynamics and aeroacoustic optimization.

At the same time, in the webinar "End-To-End Aerodynamics CFD Simulation of a Car", it was also pointed out:

Optimizing the external aerodynamics of a car can greatly improve vehicle performance and reduce fuel consumption. It can also significantly improve passenger comfort by reducing noise in the cabin. Accurate prediction of front-end airflow can optimize thermal management of key components such as heat exchangers and disc brakes.

Honda was looking for a complete tool chain for fully coupled simulation to solve the thermal management issues in the Honda CR-V model design. They needed to get accurate and realistic results and hoped to significantly reduce the overall engineering time required to obtain these results. Finally, they chose Cadence Omnis tools.

02

FuSa: Car Safety

Cadence announced last year that it will launch a solution in the field of functional safety.

Cadence announced the launch of the Cadence Safety Solution. This is a new product for safety-critical applications that integrates analog and digital safety processes and engines to accelerate ISO 26262 and IEC 61508 certification. The solution includes a new FMEDA (failure mode, effects and diagnostic analysis) product, Midas Safety Platform, which supports failure modes, effects and diagnostic analysis (FMEDA), allowing customers to perform FMEDA-driven analog and digital verification of safety-critical semiconductors in advanced automotive, industrial and aerospace applications. Midas Safety Platform also provides a GUI-driven usage model for early architectural FMEDA analysis. Once RTL/gate-level design data is available, Midas Safety Platform can perform more accurate and detailed FMEDA analysis.

03

Aging

Transistors in integrated circuits wear out over time. Aging wear has always been there, but in the past, it was a problem long after the chip reached the end of its useful life. At more advanced node processes, aging wear is a bigger problem. Another change is that in applications such as automobiles, chips need to continue to work for decades or more without any problems. Although this process is called aging, aging is not due to the passage of time, but how much activity the transistor has experienced. This is mainly a problem in analog design because there is a lot of margin in digital design.

Aging analysis is based on the bathtub curve. In the early stages, there are potential early failures that need to be eliminated before the chip is installed in the car. At the other end of the service life, aging effects may cause failures.

04

Vision

Modern cars need to be able to “see” their surroundings. Autonomous driving will require many features, of course, but even Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) features, such as lane tracking or automatic emergency braking (AEB), require the use of cameras.

Cadence has a whole family of Tensilica vision processors, the most powerful of which is the Vision Q7. These vision processors not only provide actual visual perception capabilities, but also have neural network inference capabilities (for example, recognizing the location of lane markings).