How to create a perfect environment for the local smart car ecosystem?

Editor's note: On June 7, 2022, the 2022 Automotive Chip Industry Development-Cloud Forum hosted by Gasgoo was held as scheduled. Cao Min, Ecosystem Director of Zhaoyi's Automotive Products Department, was invited to attend and publish the "Building an Ecosystem of Smart Cars". Keynote Speech.Gasgoo has compiled a text based on the speech to share with readers.

GigaDevice is a semiconductor company that focuses on chip design, mainly including memory, MCU and sensor products. After more than ten years of development, in the field of memory, GigaDevice's SPI NOR Flash global market share has reached 18.7%, In the field of MCU, GigaDevice started its layout in 2013, and now has 35 series and more than 450 MCU products.At the same time, as a semiconductor company in the field of automotive applications, a stable supply chain ecology is also indispensable. GigaDevice has established very good cooperative relations with major packaging and testing factories and wafer factories.

Strict requirements to create perfect quality

In the past two years, we have often seen the phenomenon of "lack of cores" in the automotive supply chain. In automotive applications, quality is a very important link. Zhaoyi Innovation has proposed a zero-defect quality system requirements, from the initial stage of design to research and development. , and then to the entire process of production and testing, are committed to achieving zero defect standards.At the same time, safety and ecology are both very important aspects of smart cars. GigaDevice has been working in the automotive industry for many years, and its flash memory products have been mass-produced in some original car factories and Tier 1 suppliers around the world.

A smart car is a very complex system, and its demand for performance and intelligence is increasing. The reasons for this complexity are: first, it needs to be upgraded and rich in configurability, and the second is the process of improving performance It will also increase the cost.The pursuit of higher cost performance and lower power consumption is the overall environment faced by smart cars.Therefore, how to build a more perfect car ecosystem has become an important link in the entire smart car field.Zhaoyi Innovation believes that under the development trend ofelectrification, connectivity and autonomous driving of smart cars, many applications are built in a very complex software environment. At the same time, these software environments depend on the design of the hardware platform, which is a complementary relationship. .

Concentrate on R&D, iterative innovation to meet future trends

The innovative idea of ​​Zhaoyi is to start from the body application down-to-earth. For the MCU, firstly, through some small applications, such as motor control, DC/DC, car lights and other application directions, the foundation will be consolidated.From the introduction of Zhaoyi's innovative automotive-grade MCU products, we can know that from the perspective of the entire automotive system, this is a low-complexity MCU.In the follow-up, Zhaoyi Innovation will successively launch a full range of products for different performance and functional safety level requirements. At present, in addition to the car-spec MCU that will be mass-produced this year, GD will iterate every two years to promote and fully cover low, medium and high vehicles. Regulate the MCU market, help iterate the processes of China's supply chain ecological partners, and accelerate the domestic closed loop of the entire industry chain.

In automotive systems, MCUs need to achieve high integration and continuous performance improvement. In terms of multi-core architecture, OTA, and information security hardware mechanisms, the design of MCUs and the optimization of performance and cost have brought challenges. The highly optimized Memory architecture It is the key to realize MCU performance optimization.With Zhaoyi's accumulation in memory for many years, it can not only realize the differentiation of MCU performance, but also realize more optimized use through the understanding and accumulation of Flash, thereby helping to accelerate the process maturity of supply chain ecological partners.

In terms of automotive storage, especially NOR Flash, it will not only serve as the boot load in the entire automotive system in the future, but may also carry the information security function of the entire system.Zhaoyi Innovation believes that with the rapid development of smart cars, SOC, MPU, and even high-performance MCU will require larger capacity and higher reliability for automotive storage.

With a simple L1/L2 architecture, for ADAS applications, the performance of the front camera, that is, the image sensor, is also further improved. In addition to the improvement of resolution and transmission rate, MIPI is also used for the communication interface. With various communication transmission methods, the complexity of the front camera is also further increasing, which will also increase the demand for NOR Flash.On the back-end processing side, the chip will process the signal from the camera, configure an external vehicle MCU to control real-time motion, and at the same time, the MCU will also receive the signals from the four corner radars. The further improvement of performance puts forward higher requirements for Memory and the entire system.

In the L2+ADAS block diagram, in some operations of the camera and FPGA, in addition to NOR Flash, there are a large number of DRAM applications, and more external radars will also be installed; on the solution side, there will be more SOCs And FPGA is involved. In addition to Memory and MCU, Zhaoyi also has some layouts on Serdes

Take a single-channel early warning solution in the ADAS application jointly developed by Zhaoyi and ecological partners as an example. In this system, Flash is used as the boot function, and the on-board MCU mainly monitors the functions of the entire system. Further improvement, its MCU and Flash can play a stronger and better development role in the entire smart car ecosystem.

Multi-party cooperation, committed to gradually improving the industrial ecology

In the automotive ecosystem, as a latecomer, there is still a certain gap between its ecosystem and international manufacturers. However, it is believed that with the experience accumulated in semiconductor design and the stable development of GigaDevice The supply chain system, as well as more in-depth research and development in the automotive field, hope to play a certain role in promoting the automotive ecosystem.At the same time, I also hope that more semiconductor companies in the SOC, MPU and NPU fields will join the entire ecological field of smart cars, and cooperate with many parties to lead the future, jointly create a perfect environment for the ecological field of smart cars in China, and contribute to the development of Chinese cars. Make a difference.