Reports from the Heart of the Machine
Machine Heart Editorial Department
The newly launched chip of Xinchi Technology may reshape the territory of smart cars.
Good news came from the field of domestic chips again.
Recently, the vehicle specification chip company Chip Technology officially released the high-end vehicle control unit (MCU) E3 series, which is currently the world's highest performance vehicle control MCU product.
The chip can support up to 800MHz at the main frequency, which is several times higher than the current industry peer products. Sun Mingle, Chief Architect of Chip Micro Technology, said, "The heart of E3 control is the car specification MCU carefully built by Chip Micro for future smart cars, which has four major advantages: high reliability, high safety, high performance and wide coverage."
The E3 series can be applied to tasks such as chassis-by-wire, brake control, BMS, ADAS/autonomous driving motion control, LCD instrumentation, HUD, streaming vision system CMS, etc., and achieved mass production in the third quarter of this year.
The industry's strongest automotive-controlled MCU
MCU is an indispensable core device of the automobile, which integrates memory, operator, timer, interface, etc. on a single chip to achieve the complete functions of storage, calculation and control, and apply different configurations for different application scenarios.
The high-performance MCU released by Sing-Chi Technology is a new generation of high-performance products designed for automotive safety-related applications, integrating up to 6 ARM Cortex R5 CPU cores, of which 4 cores can be configured as dual-core lock steps or independent operation, bringing new possibilities to the future application requirements of automotive intelligence.
Currently, a car typically carries 50-100 electronic control units (ECUs), each containing one or more MCUs. In new energy vehicles, the number of chips will double. In order to improve computing efficiency, collaborative execution, reduce costs and other purposes, cross-domain integration and centralized on-board chip solutions are the future direction.
Under the trend of domain controllers, the computational complexity of on-board tasks increases exponentially, and automotive chips not only need powerful computing power to process large amounts of data from multiple sensors, but also need rich network interfaces to support high-bandwidth data transmission. Traditional functional chips have gradually failed to meet the new needs of domain controllers, and E3 chips are designed to solve this challenge.
The E3 adopts TSMC's 22nm vehicle specification process, and the main frequency of the full range of vehicle-controlled MCUs starts from 300MHz and can support up to 800MHz, which is doubled compared to most of the current 100-200MHz MCUs on board. The E3 MCUs not only handle more tasks at the same time, but also process each task faster, while also guaranteeing high reliability and security.
The E3 five configurations are available for different application scenarios, including the high-performance and high-reliability series for battery management, chassis-by-wire, brake control and driver assistance, the display MCU series for LCD instrumentation, HUD and streaming vision system CMS, and the low-power series for applications such as body control, T-Box, and more.
These chips support Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, SRAM storage coverage up to 5MB, support eMMC, SD and other external storage, product package covering BGA, LQFP mode.
In the context of the lack of cores in automobiles in recent years, the products with the greatest supply pressure from various depots are MCUs. Because of its stronger performance and higher integration, The E3 of X-Chi Technology can reduce the total number of chips on board.
For example, in the future, OEMs can integrate units such as VCU (Vehicle Controller), BMS (Battery Management), or T-Box (Connected Vehicle Intelligent Terminal) and BCM (Body Control Module) together to achieve better synergy performance.
In terms of new products, Singchi will provide complete tool chain support from chips to development kits and design solutions, and is committed to creating a complete ecosystem.
Automotive chips: More difficult to build than consumer-grade chips
In recent years, with the promotion of AI and other technologies, some high-gloss chip startups have emerged in China, but in the field of automotive chips, there has not yet been a player who can shake the international giants. Singh Technology may be able to break this situation with E3.
Compared with consumer-grade chips, the risk of creating automotive semiconductors is greater and the investment is higher. Because for automotive chips, safety and reliability are the most important requirements: semiconductor failures can lead to traffic accidents, resulting in casualties. To meet the requirements, designing a vehicle-grade chip requires requirements management, safety-critical design, functional failure simulation, review and reporting, and safety certification for third-party assessment.
The applicable standards for automotive chips include the AEC-Q100 developed by the Automotive Electronics Association of the United States to measure the reliability level of automotive-grade products, and the ISO 26262 standard covers the whole life cycle of vehicle design to system, processing/control chip, embedded software, component development and related production, maintenance, end-of-life and other vehicle products.
In order to achieve high yield, it is generally necessary to implement "production line identification" for semiconductor factories when producing vehicle specification chips, which takes half a year to a year.
The Sing-Chi E3 Series meets the grade 1 level of the automotive reliability standard AEC-Q100, which means that the chip can operate stably for long periods of time over an ambient temperature range of up to 125°C. At the same time, the chip has a functional safety level of ASIL D. Based on a multicore design, the E3's dual-core lock-step Cortex-R5 achieves up to 99% diagnostic coverage, with ECC on all SRAM and E2E protection on safety-related peripherals.
The dual-core lock step means that when the E3 chip processes the task, the two CPU cores verify the output content with each other each clock cycle, which is independent of the application software and does not require a special instruction set self-test, improving hardware reliability.
Among the existing car specification MCUs, there are only a few car specification MCUs that can meet both the AEC-Q100 Grade 1 and ISO 26262 ASIL D standards.
"Between different domains, there are different functional safety levels for different modules, and if some functions require a higher safety level after integration, the entire MCU must be subject to the highest level, so E3 adopts a higher overall functional safety level." Sun Mingle said.
Extremely high safety standards ensure the driving safety of users, and also eliminate the concerns of car companies and suppliers about the application of high-performance computing power.
According to Qiu Yujing, CEO of Chip Flex Technology, Celeste completed the iso26262 ASIL D highest functional safety level process certification at the first time of its establishment, and then quickly obtained AEC-Q100 reliability certification, ISO26262 functional safety product certification and state secret certification, becoming the first "four-in-one" automotive chip enterprise in China.
The last piece of the puzzle of the car core
The E3 is the latest addition to the Singh Technology product line.
In 2020, XCHI Technologies released high-performance SoCs such as the Smart Cockpit Processor X9, the Central Gateway Processor G9, and the ADAS/Autopilot Processor V9. In 2021, Sing-Chi upgraded all its products and released the UniDrive fully open autonomous driving platform.
On the X9 cockpit chip, Chip Chip Technology provides high-performance CPU, GPU, through the deep optimization of the chip architecture, fully support multi-system virtualization, one chip simultaneously drives up to 10 high-definition displays such as instruments, central controls, rearview mirrors, rear entertainment, etc., and supports multi-screen sharing and interaction.
The G9 central gateway processor enhances packet throughput and forwarding capabilities, enabling high-traffic, low-latency data exchange between different interfaces at very low CPU usage.
The V9 for autonomous driving integrates a high-performance CPU, GPU, CV engine, and AI engine to support L2-level ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) and mainstream application scenarios for autonomous driving.
The release of E3 means that the product matrix of "four-in-one" of Sing Chi Technology is officially established, and its product system will inject new vitality into the development of intelligent and connected vehicles.
Based on the above four product lines, Singitrich also released the future-oriented "SICA Central Computing Architecture SCCA 1.0" on April 12, which not only supports the deployment of security tasks, but also has flexible system expansion capabilities.
It is worth mentioning that the four series of products of XCHI Technology adopt a common underlying architecture. Zhang Qiang, chairman of Xinchi Technology, said that the platform-based through design not only greatly reduces R&D costs and time investment, but also rapidly improves the supply chain elasticity of car manufacturers and alleviates the risk of "lack of core".
From the perspective of the global market, international manufacturers currently occupy a dominant position in the field of automotive-grade semiconductors, and the top ten manufacturers such as Infineon, NXP, and Renesas Semiconductors occupy more than 60% of the market share. With the boom of new energy, the development trend of automobile electrification, intelligence and networking has become more and more obvious, and new opportunities have emerged in the automotive chip market.
In the past two years, domestic chip companies such as Xinchi Technology and Horizon have successively won the mass production point of the main engine factory, forming a breakthrough in the vehicle specification chip market. In March 2021, Chip Technology achieved million chip orders, and the full range of products has now covered more than 70% of China's car companies.
According to statistics, ChipCom has cooperated with more than 250 partners in software, hardware, algorithms, protocol stacks, operating systems and other aspects.
On the landing of the latest products, nearly 20 OEMs and tier 1 suppliers are designing products in advance based on E3 series MCU chips. With the official release of E3, ChipCom technology has become the only chip company in China that provides all the major chips for automotive electronic and electrical architecture.
It is reported that in the second half of 2022, Xinchi Technology will also launch a single-chip autopilot processor with a computing power of 200TOPS, and supporting an open platform and ecosystem to bring upgrade space for L3 automatic driving.
"Chip Technology focuses on the field of automotive chips, and we hope that our products can replace industry-leading products without any compromise on performance and safety, rather than becoming a low-cost alternative." We've shown that this path is feasible." Sun Mingle said.