The intelligence and electrification of automobiles have increased the demand for MCUs, and also require MCU to improve their performance to adapt to the future development trends of automotive. With the changes in automotive electronic and electrical architecture, the performance of traditional MCUs has gradually bottomed out. Will they gradually withdraw from the future automotive market?
On traditional distributed ECUs, the function of the Microcontroller is only to execute some simple control instructions, and its computing power is low. It is mainly used in equipment such as car lights, body electronic stability systems, entertainment audio and video, ABS, and LCD instruments. The ECU can monitor vehicle operating data or receive operating instructions, and send parameters and instructions to relevant execution modules to achieve different control functions.
However, the rise of domain controllers has taken the automotive E/E architecture a big step towards centralized development. When a domain controller needs to handle almost half of the electronic components of the entire vehicle, the computing power and performance of the traditional MCU cannot meet the demand. The domain control architecture stage can be divided into a central domain controller and a cross-domain controller.
Source: Internet
The central domain controller architecture communicates with each functional domain through Ethernet and CAN bus. For example, more traditional manufacturers divide the E/E architecture into five parts: autonomous driving domain, power domain, chassis domain, cockpit domain, and body domain.
The cross-domain controller architecture is more integrated. Integrate the control module according to the location domain, while reducing the length of the wiring harness, it can greatly reduce the usage of the ECU.
The computing power upgrade of processing chips is at the heart of the trend toward domain controllers. Smart cars require more sensors, which will bring an increase in the amount of data. While the computing power of traditional MCUs cannot satisfy the processing of large amounts of data.
Infineon automotive MCU products, from TC178x to TC2xx, T4Dx, have developed computing power from the initial 2 DMIPS/MHz to 8000 DMIPS/MHz.
With the constantly improving performance of Microcontrollers, a kind of MPU with higher main frequency and computing power than ordinary MCUs is gradually born. MPU generally needs external RAM and FLASH, can run a large operating system, and supports complex task processing. But generally speaking, more MCUs will be used in scenarios with higher real-time requirements.
Compared to SoC, such as Qualcomm's SA85xx, which computing power has already exceeded 100K DMIPS/MHz. SoC is a system-level chip, which is composed of CPU+GPU+DSP+NPU+ various peripheral interfaces, storage types, and other electronic components. It has a high degree of integration and more complex functions.
SoC cannot Replace All MCUs
The advantage of SoC is that it can allocate more resources, transmit, and operate more efficiently. SoC is currently the mainstream in the field of autonomous driving and smart cockpits. However, under the framework of domain control, many solutions cannot be implemented with a single SoC at present, that's why the SoC cannot replace all MCUs.
At present, ADAS domain controllers are generally composed of a functional safety MCU and a large computing power SoC. The SoC is responsible for intelligent driving sensing, algorithm operation, etc. The MCU serves as a safety redundancy, responsible for system security and detecting the operating status of chips, power supply, communications, etc.
The application of SoC+MCU, for example, such as the "four-leaf clover" architecture of Zero Run. It combines the four domains of intelligent cockpit, intelligent driving, vehicle control, and power into a central domain controller composed of two motherboards, SoC and MCU. The SoC is compatible with Qualcomm's 8295/8155 solution to control the smart cockpit and smart driving domain; and features NXP MCU S32G, which is responsible for power and body control.
If SoC integrates the functional safety MCU, can it replace the MCU? This solution has not yet been verified, especially in the automotive industry with extremely high functional safety requirements, and it is still difficult to be widely accepted. Therefore, SoC+MCU will still be the mainstream solution for a long time to come.
Conclusion
Although the penetration rate of new energy vehicles is gradually increasing, overall, traditional fuel vehicles still occupy a large market share. In addition, the iteration of automotive E/E architecture takes a long time to advance to existing models. Therefore, the demand for automotive MCUs will gradually decrease with the development of domain control architecture, but this process will be relatively long.