According to Bloomberg News, in November, South Korea's semiconductor production fell by the most since the global financial crisis. According to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Thursday, chip production shrank for the fourth consecutive month, down 15% year-on-year; overall industrial production shrank 3.7% from a year earlier,

As South Korea's leading semiconductor company, Samsung has a leading position in DRAM and NAND flash memory chips. However, as the memory chip market has shown a downward trend this year, Samsung Electronics has shifted its focus to the automotive industry, focusing on automotive chips, aiming to become a global giant by 2025.

The intelligentization of automobiles has become a trend, which means that the demand for automotive chips will skyrocket in the future. A self-driving car would need about six times as many chips as today's cars with internal combustion engines. IHS Markit estimated that the market size of automotive chips at the beginning of this year was US$45 billion, and it is expected to grow to US$110 billion by 2030, with an annual growth rate of about 9%. The scene is still bright.

As advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), autonomous vehicles (AV) and electric vehicles (EV) develop, more AI and 5G-connected components will be required.

Three New Automotive Solutions

Samsung has released three new automotive solutions to improve 5G connectivity and security.

Samsung Automotive Solutions

Exynos Auto T5123

The T5123 is a new telematics control unit, AEC-Q100 qualified, designed for express use in enabling 5G communications in both standalone and non-standalone vehicles. Utilizing a 5G New Radio (NR) sub-6 GHz modem, the T5123 can achieve download speeds of up to 5.1 Gbps for real-time communication between vehicles and their passengers.

The device is built around two Cortex-A55 cores supported by embedded LPDDR4x DRAM. A high-speed PCIe Gen4 2-lane interface and a built-in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) system are also available. In addition, the T5123 integrates TrustZone and secure boot functions to ensure security.

Exynos Auto V7

Exynos Auto V7 is an automotive processor designed for in-vehicle infotainment systems. It supports up to four displays and 12 camera inputs simultaneously. Additionally, the processor incorporates functions such as bad pixel correction, dynamic range compression, and geometric distortion correction to ensure distortion-free images.

Source: Internet

It integrates eight 1.5 GHz Arm Cortex-A76 cores and 11 Arm Mali G76 GPU cores. The graphics processing unit core is used to display and augment the reality head-up display, and provide the central information display function. To support these cores, the V7 has up to 32GB of LPDDR4x.

In addition to this, the V7 is equipped with an integrated neural processing unit (NPU) to assist facial, voice or gesture recognition functions, an isolated security processor for cryptographic operations, and a physical unclonable function (PUF) based technology hardware key.

S2VPS01

Consisting of a high-efficiency three-phase/two-phase step-down converter, the S2VPS01 is a new automotive power management integrated circuit (PMIC) designed to support Exynos Auto V9 and V7.

This PMIC integrates a low-dropout regulator (LDO) and real-time clock with built-in protections including overvoltage, undervoltage, short circuit, overcurrent, thermal shutdown and clock monitoring

According to Samsung, the S2VPS01 is the company's first automotive solution to be produced in accordance with ISO 26262 and to achieve ASIL-B certification in 2021.

These three products provide new automotive subsystem solutions. With the development of vehicle electrification and intelligence, innovative automotive-grade electronic products will become an inevitable trend. We will wait and see what impetus Samsung will bring to the automotive industry.