The semiconductor industry is going through a down cycle. This year, with the gradual recovery of chip delivery, product prices have fallen, and demand in some markets has slowed down, many institutions have lowered their expectations for the semiconductor market next year. IC Insights believes that global semiconductor demand will experience a cyclical decline in 2023, and total annual sales are expected to decrease by 5%.
In recent months, various products have been affected by the market, even the MCU that has been in focus. However, with the popularity of new energy vehicles, the growth of the MCU market has been promoted on the other hand. The application markets of MCU mainly include automotive electronics, industrial control, consumer electronics, medical health, and so on. Demand for consumer electronics has declined this year. In order to mitigate the impact of abnormal inventory levels brought by consumer MCUs, many MCU manufacturers plan to focus on developing mid-to-high-end 32-bit products.
The 32-bit MCU market will usher in a revolution
Automotive electronics applications account for the largest proportion of MCU applications, and the industry generally believes that the automotive industry will become an important driving force for the growth of MCU products. A traditional car needs about 70 MCUs, while a smart car needs at least 300 MCUs. There are mainly 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit automotive MCUs. Among them, the 8-bit MCU is mainly used in the control of low-end functions such as automotive fans, wipers, sunroofs, windows, and seats. The working frequency of 32-bit MCU is mostly between 100-350MHz, and the processing power and execution performance are better than 8/16-bit. The 32-bit MCU is mainly used for high-end function control such as vehicle control, smart instrument, multimedia information system, power system, and assisted driving.
With the electrification and intelligence of automobiles, electric vehicles, especially body-mounted modules, have an increasing demand for wide power domain MCUs, which will also drive a substantial increase in the future demand for 32-bit MCUs in automobiles.
The increase in the intelligence of automobiles will also promote the upgrading of manufacturing processes. Currently, automotive MCUs are mainly manufactured at the 90nm node. The McKinsey report predicts that by 2030, the demand for automotive chips manufactured with 90nm and above processes will still account for 67%, but the compound annual growth rate of the supply of such chips in the next five years will only be 5%. Chips will be in tight supply for years. Insufficient production capacity of the 90nm process has prompted automotive chip manufacturers to migrate to the 65/55nm node, and some even directly advance to 40nm. It will take at least five years for a new chip manufactured with a 40nm process to pass verification. After the verification is completed, the mainstream manufacturing process of automotive chips will migrate from 90nm to 40nm. Therefore, after the new 5-7 years, the process upgrade boom will also kick-off.
Technology Development of MCU
NXP recently announced its new MCX N MCUs, the first devices to embed NXP NPUs. The MCX N series also includes the MCX N94x and MCX N54x, both embedding dual Arm Cortex-m33 cores with clock speeds up to 150MHz. Other features include 2MB flash memory, optional full ECC RAM, and a DSP coprocessor for audio and voice processing. Compared with core solutions using CPUs, this integrated NPU can achieve up to 30 times higher machine learning throughput and lower overall power consumption.
To meet the needs of automotive systems, Infineon and TSMC have collaborated to add TSMC's resistive RAM (RRAM) non-volatile memory technology to Infineon's next-generation AURIX family of MCUs. MCUs with embedded flash memory has been a key component in automotive electronic control units (ECUs). Infineon says RRAM is the next step for embedded memory because it can scale to 28nm and beyond.
Infineon said it is shipping samples of its AURIX TC4x family to key customers based on TSMC's 28nm eFlash technology. First samples based on 28nm RRAM technology are expected to be available to engineering customers by the end of 2023.
STMicroelectronics, one of the MCU giants, recently announced that it has completed the EMVCo1 certification of its STPay-Topaz-Bio biometric payment card platform. The platform is co-packaged with ST MCU STM32L443 in an EMV-compliant module. EMVCo is the organization that manages EMV specifications and testing procedures for card payments worldwide, through which certification guarantees the security of the platform and its interoperability with payment systems.
Source: STMicroelectronics
The secure element used in this platform is ST's ST31N600 secure element IC. The chip is essentially an MCU and provides several defenses for card payment applications and sensitive processes, including biometric template matching for cardholder authentication, using a software library developed by Fingerprint Cards AB.
What runs on ST31N600 is a safe operating system. The device is built on the latest Arm SecurCore architecture. Designers can easily introduce value-add card functionality by securely connecting various types of peripherals.
The STPay-Topaz-Bio platform also features energy harvesting for battery-free operation and complies with standards for contact and contactless cards: EMV ISO 7816, ISO14443.
Embedded system design has been very different from the past with the change of application requirements. Various MCU suppliers are offering new co-processing, memory technologies and application-specific features to develop new solutions for further future requirements.