STMicroelectronics has released the Stellar P6 automotive MCU, the industry’s first qualifiable device for the model year 2024 vehicles to integrate the new CAN-XL in-car communication standard.
Stellar P6 can better support the development of next-generation electric vehicles, and its target application is the upcoming trend of electric drive and the OTA (Over-The-Air) wireless update domain control system of next-generation electric vehicles. This technology can help new Vehicle platforms better handle and cope with the ever-increasing stream of data, keeping the vehicle performance always at its best.
STMicroelectronics provides Stellar automotive MCUs
STMicroelectronics offers the Stellar automotive MCU product family to drive the carmakers transitioning to software-defined vehicles for their next-generation vehicle platforms to manage the complexity and performance of the new features they are adding to vehicles.
Source: STMicroelectronics
Stellar E-Series: Ensuring power conversion applications, enabling fast real-time control and system miniaturization, maximizing the benefits of SiC and GaN power technologies in applications such as EV on-board charging, DC-DC converters, and electric drive inverters.
Stellar G series MCU: Mainly used in the body domain of the automotive domain control architecture, securely manages data and integrates functions for real-time security. The series enables excellent software over-the-air updates and low-power modes, sending and receiving data via a wide range of in-vehicle communication protocols.
The newly launched Stellar P series automotive MCU integrates advanced executive control capabilities and powerful functionality. Stellar P products target new electric vehicle electric drive technology trends and automotive domain control architectures, enabling excellent real-time performance and energy management.
The Stellar P6 uses energy-efficient 28nm FD-SOI technology and embeds non-volatile memory (PCM) with a capacity of up to 20MB. FD-SOI technology is quasi-radiation resistant, providing protection against system unavailability issues and ensuring that the chip meets the strictest safety standards.
It also houses up to six Arm® Cortex® R52 processor cores, some of which run in dual-core lockstep and some are split-core to provide fail-safe redundancy for applications. Stellar P6 uses Cortex-R52 features and firewalls to solve hardware virtualization issues (sandboxing), accessing resources on demand, which simplifies the development and integration of multi-source software on the same chip, while ensuring secure isolation of applications and performance.
The new Microcontroller for EV platform system integration
With the development of science and technology, automotive applications face more complex and higher performance requirements, such as electrification, assisted driving, and autonomous driving. Transformation requires changes in the vehicle platform architecture, including a shift from multiple electronic control units (ECUs) managing a small subsystem to domain or zone controllers that integrate multiple functions.
In addition to ensuring the performance and safety of the car, the Stellar MCUs also needs to achieve higher processing performance and integrate important functions. In a software-defined car driven entirely by electronic systems, fully synchronized operation of all systems, secure over-the-air software upgrades, simplified vehicle maintenance, and continuous improvement in performance.
over-the-air updates with no downtime are to achieve the purpose of saving memory space by dynamically allocating memory space for the newly downloaded software image before the new update software is effective. During the download process, the rest of the memory continues to execute the running application in real-time.
The on-chip fast hardware information security module (HSM) adds a dual-core lockstep encryption engine, supports ASIL D functional safety level information security functions, and can implement enhanced EVITA full security functions. The new products also provide high-speed secure encryption services and secure network authentication to further protect manufacturers' firmware and end-user data.